Seventy Miles to the Mat

My husband Rob works for the public power district. He is a lineman, a big, slow-talking man who has climbed poles in ice storms and never once complained in my hearing. When I told him that night, he put down his fork and stood up.

“I’m going over there,” he said.

“No.”

“Nic, he can’t talk to her like that.”

“He didn’t talk to her like anything. He talked to her like she was a policy.” I put my hand flat on the table. “If you go over there, it turns into a fight between you and Wade, and Maddie becomes the reason. I won’t have that. Not for the sake of one winter.”

Rob stood there for a long moment with his hands opening and closing. He is not a man who stops easily. But he looked at the doorway where Maddie had gone up to her room, and he sat back down.

“Then what do we do?” he said.

I did not have an answer yet. I had a laptop and a kitchen table and a daughter who was not going to eat her supper. So I started looking.

At midnight I found a club in Grand Island. The girls’ team there had eleven wrestlers, which in our part of Nebraska is a crowd, and the head coach was a man named Herb Burkhalter who had a short, plain page with a phone number at the bottom.

I wrote to him at 12:20 in the morning, a stiff little email that said I had a fifteen-year-old daughter with three years of garage practice and no club. I did not tell him why. I just asked if there was room.

He wrote back in under an hour. I found out later he gets up at four to open the gym.

“Bring her Monday,” it said. “Six o’clock. Tell her to bring water and no excuses.”

It was seventy miles from our front door to his mat room. I measured it on the odometer the first night and again the second. Seventy miles each way, hundred and forty round trip, three nights a week.

People ask me now how I did it, and the honest answer is that I did not think about it. I thought about Monday. Then I thought about Wednesday. You do not drive a winter, you drive a night.

I work as a hygienist at the dental clinic in town, and I get off at 4:45. We were on the road by five. Maddie ate a peanut butter sandwich in the passenger seat with a towel across her lap, and I drove south out of the valley with the sun going down on my right.

The road is two lanes at first, past cattle lots and feed bins and the sort of farmyards where every dog knows your car. Then it widens, and then there are stoplights, and then the gym.

Gas ran about eighteen dollars a trip. I kept the receipts in the glove box without really meaning to, and in February I added them up on the back of an envelope. It came to close to seven hundred dollars.