The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The pair of shoes

There is a moment from that first month that I have never told anyone but my father, and I want to put it down here.

Bree Pickett had been practicing in a pair of canvas sneakers with the sole coming loose at the toe. I had noticed.

Her mother worked nights at the nursing home in Marlow, and the shoes were her brother’s old ones, and I did not know how to bring it up.

I had decided I would buy her a pair myself, quietly, and leave the box in the gym. I had the size picked out. I was going to do it on Friday.

On Thursday, when I went to put the ball rack away, Bree’s gym bag was sitting by the door. It was open, and lying on top of her sweatshirt was a pair of girls’ basketball shoes, white with a blue stripe, the laces still tied.

I knew those shoes. They were Lily’s spare pair from last season, the ones she had outgrown by half a size and kept on her closet floor as a kind of trophy.

She had not said a word to me. She had not said a word to anyone.

I stood there holding the cart handle. Down the hall I could hear my daughter laughing with the others, ordinary and loud, and I thought: that is the person Greg cut. That is who he did not want.

The next Tuesday Bree wore them. She walked in, laced them tight, and looked at Lily across the gym for exactly one second.

Lily looked back and then looked away, and neither of them ever mentioned it, and Bree wore those shoes to every game after.

Greg’s mother

In the second week of December I ran into his mother at the Hy-Vee in Marlow. Adele is seventy, small, with a perm she has kept the same since 1989.

She was standing in the bread aisle with a cart that had one loaf in it, and when she saw me she did not pretend she had not.

“Stacy,” she said. “I heard about the gym.”

“News gets around.”

“It always does.” She straightened a package of rolls that did not need it. “I should have called. I wanted to call. I couldn’t think what I would say.”

I told her she did not owe me a call. She shook her head slowly, looking at the rolls.

“He’s in a hole, honey,” Adele said. “The team costs more than the fees cover. The van, the tournament entries, the motel in Salina.

Last spring he put eleven hundred dollars on a card and never told anyone. Shawna’s brother covered it. And Shawna’s brother has a daughter.”

I understood then. I did not say it. It was not an excuse, and Adele did not offer it as one, and she did not ask me to forgive him. She just stood there in the bread aisle and told me what she knew.

“He knew it was wrong the minute he did it,” she said. “I saw his face at Thanksgiving. He ate and he did not say ten words.

He’s not a bad man. He’s a man who said yes to something and can’t find his way back out of it.”

“His way out is a phone call to Lily,” I said.

“I know.” She picked up her one loaf. “I told him that.”

I put my hand on her arm and then I took it away. She went off toward the registers with her small cart, and I stood a while in the bread aisle with my own, and I did not feel any triumph at all.