The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The note on the feed store board

The bulletin board at the Pruitt feed store is where everything in our part of the county gets said.

It holds hay for sale, kittens, a lost dog, and a card from a woman who irons for a living. I stood in front of it that same afternoon with an index card and a pen.

Girls who didn’t make a team and want to play. Sixth and seventh grade. Tuesday and Thursday, 4:00, Garber gym. No cost. Ask for Stacy.

Then I went home and told Lily what I had done. She was sitting at the kitchen table doing math homework she had no interest in, and she did not look up when I started talking, and she did not look up when I finished.

“You rented a gym,” she said.

“Forty dollars a week.”

“For who?”

“For you. And whoever else comes.”

She put down her pencil. Her face did something complicated, and then it settled into a look I had seen on her father when he was working out whether to trust a thing.

“Nobody’s going to come,” Lily said. “And if they do, it’s just going to be the girls he didn’t want.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly that.”

She was quiet. A truck went by on the county road, and the dog next door barked at it, and my daughter, who is twelve and stubborn and much braver than I am, picked her pencil back up.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I guess I know them.”

The first afternoon

On Tuesday I left the scale house at three and got to Garber a little before four.

The heat had come on, and the gym smelled like dust and old varnish and a faint sweetness I could not place until I realized it was the memory of a hundred pep rallies.

I turned on the lights, which took four tries and a switch in the hallway. Daylight poured through the tall windows onto the floor.

I stood in the middle of it with a mesh bag of three basketballs and a whistle I had bought at the farm store for six dollars.

My father walked in at ten till, with his cap on and his knee making its small complaint on the steps. He looked up at the ceiling and the bleachers and the dead scoreboard hanging over the far baseline.

“Well,” Dad said. “She’s still standing.”

He carried a folding chair over to the scorer’s table, set it down, and sat. He took the stopwatch out of his coat pocket, where it had ridden in from the glovebox, set it on the table in front of him, and folded his hands.

“You don’t have to stay,” I said.

“Somebody ought to keep time.”

That was all he said about it. He has not missed a practice since, not for weather, not for his knee, not for a doctor’s appointment he moved twice.

At five till four a car pulled into the gravel lot. Then a pickup. Then a minivan with a cracked taillight. I stood at the door and counted girls getting out, and I counted until my own daughter came up behind me and counted along.