Seventy Miles to the Mat

He had been out in the shop for an hour. He had dragged out old foam from the horse trailer, an old blue gym mat he had gotten at a school auction, and a roll of wrestling tape from nobody knew where, and he had laid them across the concrete floor, wall to wall.

It was not much. It was a strip eight feet wide, taped at the seams, under a shop light with a space heater roaring in the corner. But it was a mat.

“It’s not regulation,” Rob said, scratching the back of his neck. “But you can’t fall off it.”

Maddie stood there looking at it. I watched her throat move.

“Dad,” she said.

“Go on. Show me the hip thing.”

She did. She showed him the hip heist and the sprawl and the stand-up. He got down on one knee in his stocking feet, like a man who had never wrestled a day in his life, and let his fifteen-year-old daughter throw him on the floor over and over.

About eight o’clock the side door of the shop opened, and a figure in a hooded coat stamped snow onto the concrete.

It was Brody. He had walked over from his house, half a mile in the storm, with his headgear hanging from one hand.

“I heard,” he said. He looked at the floor, not at any of us. “Is it okay if I drill?”

Maddie looked at him. I looked at Rob. Rob looked at the ceiling, as men do when they are being very careful not to feel something.

“Put your headgear on, bud,” Rob said.

The two of them drilled until ten. I made hot chocolate and stood in the doorway with my arms folded, watching my daughter and her cousin, one boy and one girl, throwing each other around on a taped-together mat in the snow.

Brody walked home at ten-thirty. At the door he stopped and said to the floor, “Please don’t tell Dad.”

“I won’t,” I said.

I did not. But I have wondered since whether he did not know, and I have wondered whether Wade did know, and let it go. There are things my brother has never said aloud and never will.

After that, winter was a long gray road. The practices went on. Maddie’s hands grew rough and her neck grew thick, and the girl who had been teaching herself from a phone started winning matches against girls who had wrestled since they were six.

Because her own small school had no wrestling program at all, which is why Wade’s club was the only game in town, Coach Herb arranged for her to enter through a cooperative agreement with a Grand Island school. A secretary at our high school signed a form and Maddie became, on paper, a member of the team that had taken her in.

We never made a speech about any of it. We kept driving. We ate Runza on the way home on Thursdays, Maddie with her feet up on the dashboard and her hair coming loose from its braid, and there were nights I thought, this is the happiest she has ever been.

Then there were nights I thought, and he is missing it.