Seventy Miles to the Mat

I stood there with my back against the cinder block. I would like to say I felt something clean and forgiving. I did not. I felt tired, and sorry for a seventeen-year-old boy I had never met, and still angry at the man he turned into.

Both of those things were true, and I let them be.

When I came back, Maddie was sitting on a folding chair with her shoes off and her medal in her lap, reading the back of it like a letter.

The Platte Valley paper ran Rob’s picture the following Thursday.

Coach Herb had mailed it in himself, with three lines of copy and the name of our town spelled right. It ran on the front page, above the fold, under a headline that said Local Girl Takes Fourth at State, and the town did what small towns do.

Mrs. Alvarado at the feed store taped it inside the window. The hardware store taped another one beside the register. At the clinic, a man in for a cleaning told me he had cut it out for his granddaughter, and he would not open his mouth for me until I told him about the road.

At church on Sunday, Pastor Dan said Maddie’s name from the pulpit and asked her to stand. She did, in her good dress, with her braid down her back and her ears turning pink. Then the whole congregation did something that does not happen often in our church. They clapped.

I looked across the aisle. My mother was clapping with her purse in her lap, and her eyes were wet, and she did not look at anyone.

In March the parents of Wade’s wrestlers did what parents do in a valley this size. They talked in parking lots and in the pickup line at school until the talking turned into a plan.

Dewey Hagen owns the armory. He bought it from the county the year the Guard unit moved out, and he has been a friend of our family since before I was married. Our father played checkers with him every Sunday for thirty years. Wade’s club had the building on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on a handshake and a key.

Dewey called me on a Wednesday. “Come by next Tuesday at six, Nic,” he said. “Bring Maddie. I’m not going to tell you why, and I’d like you not to ask your brother.”

Forty-one people came. I counted. Mothers and fathers sat on folding chairs in rows on the old blue mats, and the heater at the back ticked.

Maddie sat beside me in her maroon sweatshirt. She had not wanted to come, and then she had decided that she would, and she kept her medal in her jacket pocket with her hand on top of it.

Wade came in last, with his clipboard. He took a chair by the door and did not look up. He looked like a man who had been told what the meeting was about and had decided to sit through it anyway.