Seventy Miles to the Mat

I will give him that.

Marcy Dolan stood first. Her twin boys have wrestled for Wade for six years, and she is not a woman who raises her voice. “We’ve talked it over,” she said. “Fourteen families signed. Our kids are moving to the new girls’ practice night, and it’s open to any child in the county who wants to come, with no cuts for any reason but behavior.”

There was a long quiet. Somebody’s chair creaked.

Dewey stood and took the key ring off his belt. He worked one brass key loose from it, slowly, as if it had been on there a long time. “Tuesday nights are Emery Hruska’s from now on,” he said. “He wrestled for Kearney. He’s got two daughters. He’s head coach. Wade is welcome to stay on as his assistant, if he chooses.”

He put the key in Emery’s palm and closed Emery’s fingers over it. I have never heard a room that quiet with forty-one people in it.

Wade did not say anything. He sat with the clipboard flat on his knee, and for a moment I thought he might stand. He did not. He got up, set the clipboard on the table by the door, and walked out into the cold, and I heard his truck start in the lot.

I did not feel like I had won anything. I want to be honest about that. I felt the way you feel when a thing you have been leaning against for a year is finally taken away, and you are standing there still bracing for it.

Maddie put her hand on mine.

“Mom.”

“Yeah, baby.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“Me too,” she said, and then, after a minute, “It’s open now.”

“It’s open now,” I said.

By the first Tuesday of the next November there were eleven girls on the armory mat. Eleven, from sixth grade on up, in borrowed shoes and old basketball shorts, and a boy named Austin who showed up in a gray T-shirt and asked Emery if he could try it too. Emery said yes. Everyone is allowed to be bad at something.

I did not stay. I had a Monday to drive.

At 4:45 I pulled out of the clinic lot, and at five Maddie was waiting at the end of the drive with her bag over her shoulder and her braid done up tight. She got in and put her feet on the dashboard. She hung the medal on the rearview mirror, where it turned slowly on its ribbon.

We went south out of the valley with the sun going down on the right, past the cattle lots, past the feed bins, past the one blinking light in Elba. The medal swung at every curve and caught the last of the light.

“Number eleven,” I said.

“Hang on.” She chewed her pencil. “Seven x equals sixty-three.”

“I got eight.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I know,” I said, and drove on, with seventy miles of road in front of us and my daughter laughing in the passenger seat.