The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The scale house

My name is Stacy Kimball. I am thirty-eight years old.

I work the scale house at the co-op elevator in Pruitt, Kansas, where I weigh the grain trucks coming in off the fields, pull the probe samples, and run the moisture test while the driver drinks his coffee.

I ran point guard for my high school team.

We were not good, but I could see the floor like it was laid out on a table, and I could get the ball to a girl standing where she was supposed to be. I have not stopped being able to do that.

Greg and I split up two years before the cut. I will not tell you all of it. He was not a monster.

He was a man who liked being the one people looked to, and I was tired of being the one who stood behind him with the orange slices.

My father, Irwin, lives four miles outside Pruitt on the place my grandfather farmed. He is seventy-one and retired off the county road crew after thirty-one years.

He has a bad knee, a good dog, and a stopwatch he keeps in the glovebox of his truck for reasons he has never explained.

I told him that night on the phone. I did not tell him the whole thing, only that Lily had been cut and that I was going to do something about it. He was quiet on the line for a moment.

“Do what,” he said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well,” my father said. “Let me know when you do.”

I drove Lily home.

She went straight to her room and shut the door, and I stood in the hall and listened to the quiet, and then I heard a basketball bounce once on the carpet and stop, like she had caught it against her chest.

Twelve miles

The next morning was a Saturday. I made pancakes. Lily ate two and drank her milk and said she was going to ride her bike, which in November in Kansas is a sentence that means a girl needs to be somewhere with no one watching.

I went to Garber. I cannot tell you exactly why.

Garber is twelve miles east of Pruitt, a town of maybe two hundred people with a grain bin, a post office, and a high school that the district shut nine years ago when the enrollment fell below what the state would pay for.

I stood there with my hands in my jacket pockets for longer than I want to say. Then I drove three blocks to the city office, which is a single room above what used to be the bank, and I climbed the stairs.

Pat was at the desk. She is the city clerk, the treasurer, and, as far as I could tell, most of the government of Garber. She looked at me over her glasses and asked what she could do for me.

“The school gym,” I said. “Does anybody rent it?”

“Rent it.” She laughed, not unkindly. “Honey, the district owns the building, but the city has the key and the insurance on the gym because of the polling place. We had a church group in it for a rummage sale in the spring.”

“I’d need it Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Through March, probably.”

“What for?”

“Basketball. Girls. Sixth and seventh grade.”

She took her glasses off. She looked at me for a long, ordinary moment, the way people in a town that size look at you, taking in your truck and your jacket and the fact that your hands were not shaking.

“Forty dollars a week,” she said. “The heat is on a timer, and I couldn’t tell you what it does after it kicks in. You sweep and you mop before you leave. If the pipes freeze, that’s yours.”

“I’ll mop.”

“The key’s in a coffee can in my bottom drawer,” Pat said. “Don’t tell the school board I said so.”

I wrote her a check for the first four weeks, one hundred sixty dollars, out of the account where I had been saving for new tires.

She wrote me a receipt on a pad with a pen that had a bank’s name printed on the side.