The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The sponsor

On Monday morning, before I had finished my coffee at the scale house, a man in a clean canvas coat walked in through the door, and I knew him at once.

He was Mr. Hartman, who owns the implement dealership in Marlow and had put his name across the backs of Greg’s navy warmups for four years.

“I sat in the second row on Saturday,” he said. “Same as I have every year. Watched a team I pay for lose to a team that bought its shirts at the farm store.”

“They played well,” I said.

“They did. I watched your girl at the line.” He turned the hat in his fingers.

“I’ve sponsored that club for four years, and I never once looked at what it did with the money. I’m looking now. Looks like a place where a spot goes to whoever’s got a relative.”

“Here’s what I’d like to do,” Mr. Hartman said. “I’d like to pay for uniforms for your team. Real ones.

And the league fees, and a van if you need it. I’m not asking for my name on the back. I’d just like it to go where it does some good.”

I told him I would have to think about it. He nodded.

He said he would be in the shop all week, and put on his hat, and walked out into the cold, and I stood at the scale window with a pencil in my hand and the moisture tester beeping on the counter.

Two weeks later three families left Greg’s team. They did not make a speech about it.

They simply did not come to the first practice after the tournament, and by the end of January his roster had gone from eleven to seven, and the spring season began with a team that did not have enough girls to scrimmage.

In February I met Adele in the same bread aisle at the Hy-Vee, with the same single loaf in her cart.

“He’s paying the van fees himself now,” she said. “He’s out at the shop in the evenings, working. He doesn’t say anything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.

“Don’t be,” Adele said. “He knows.”

The gym in Garber

In November, one year to the week after cut night, I left the scale house at three and drove to Garber on a Tuesday. A thin, bright November sun came through the tall windows in long bars across the old floor.

The fourteen girls were already there. Hailey Bauer, who now stood five-eight and could run, was sweeping the floor with a push broom, because she said I had always told them to leave the place cleaner than they found it.

Sadie was lacing her shoes on the bottom row of the bleachers. Autumn, still fouling, was being lectured by Olivia.

Bree was shooting corner threes in a pair of white shoes with a blue stripe worn nearly through at the toe, and she would not hear of getting new ones.

The new uniforms sat in a cardboard box on the scorer’s table, gray with a small white stripe and no name across the back. Lily was unfolding them one at a time and laying them out in a row, counting the numbers as she went.

My father sat in his folding chair with his knee out straight and his cap pushed back.

He set the stopwatch on the table in front of him, looked at it, and then looked up at me and lifted one eyebrow the way he does when he is waiting for the work to start.

I blew the whistle. It rang off the tall windows and the old varnished floor and the scoreboard that still had not been turned on, and a lot of sneakers squeaked toward me across the boards.

The heat had not come on yet. It would, and by the end of practice it would settle at fifty-five degrees, and we would run the lines in our coats until we were warm.

Dad clicked the stopwatch, and a ball hit the floor, and then another, and the sound filled the whole room.