Seventy Miles to the Mat

Thanksgiving was at my mother’s. Mom has the same farmhouse table she has had for fifty-one years, and that year she pushed a card table up against the end and put it in the corner of the dining room. Two tables. She said it was because there were too many of us.

There were eleven.

Wade carved the turkey the way our father did, with a long knife and a long silence. He passed the potatoes to Rob. He asked me about the clinic. He said nothing at all to Maddie, and he did not look at her end of the table once.

My mother caught my eye across the room and gave her head the smallest shake. Leave it, she meant. Leave your brother be. He has his reasons.

I did not ask what the reasons were. I should have. But my mother is seventy-one and has never once told any of us more than she meant to, and I had spent my whole life taking that for wisdom.

Brody looked, though. Brody is sixteen, with Wade’s shoulders and Wade’s way of standing with his weight on one hip, and he looked at Maddie like a boy trying to say something with his whole face.

That night my daughter’s phone buzzed on the counter. She read it and handed it to me without a word.

It was from Brody. “Dad drives by the armory after dark,” it said. “He just sits there with the lights off.”

I read it twice. Then I handed it back.

“What does that mean?” Maddie said.

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Why would he sit there?”

“I don’t know.”

I wish I could say I put it together. I did not. I thought my brother was sulking. I thought he was a man who had said a hard thing and could not take it back. I had never once asked myself what was behind the hard thing.

December came in with a blizzard. It hit on a Wednesday, a white wall out of the northwest that closed the road at the county line before we were even out of the valley.

We turned around in a gas station parking lot with the wind rocking the car. The snow was so thick I could not see the end of the hood. Maddie sat with her hands pressed between her knees and did not complain.

“Coach will understand,” I said.

“I know.” Her voice was small. “It’s just, I’ll fall behind.”

“Fall behind who?”

“Everybody.”

I could not argue. I did not have an answer to that. We went home and sat at the kitchen table with the snow ticking on the window, and she said she was fine, and she was not.

Rob came in from the shop an hour later with snow on his shoulders and a look I knew. It is the look he gets when he has decided to fix something.

“Put your boots on,” he said. “Both of you.”