The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The third quarter

In the third quarter Hailey was standing exactly where Taylor wanted to be, three times in a row. The third time the girl bounced the ball off her own foot, and the Marlow gym made a sound like air going out of a tire.

Sadie went left.

She had been told to go right since she was six years old, and for a month I had stood beside her saying left, and now she went left on a break at the top of the key and laid the ball up off the glass.

Bree hit a shot from the corner, in my daughter’s old shoes. Then she hit another one. She looked at the rim after the second like she did not trust what it had done. Then the whole gym got loud.

I did not look at Greg. I should say that. I had decided in the truck on the way to Marlow that I would not look at him for the whole game, and I did not. I watched my girls. I watched the floor.

But I heard him. A coach’s voice carries in a gym.

I heard him call a timeout with four minutes left in the third, and I heard it crack on the word timeout, and I understood what it meant for a man to hear that sound after four years of quiet.

By the end of the quarter we were up two. In the fourth quarter we got to four, then six, then eight.

The girl I had told Hailey not to chase had begun to look for a place to pass, which is what a point guard does when she runs out of road.

With a minute left we were up ten, and my father, at the scorer’s table, took off his cap and put it on his knee, the way he does at funerals.