The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The line

They started fouling. It is what a team does when it is behind and has run out of clock: it stops the time on purpose and sends the other side to the line. Autumn went first and missed both.

Then it was Lily’s turn. The ball went to her on the left wing, and a girl from the other team grabbed her arm, hard, and the referee blew the whistle.

Two shots. Thirty seconds. A lead of ten, which meant that two made free throws would put us at twelve.

The bleachers had gone quiet in the way a church goes quiet, all at once and without any one person starting it. Even the Lions Club cook, I swear, had stopped scooping chips.

My father, at the scorer’s table, lifted his stopwatch off the table and held it up in his hand like a lantern. He did not look at the clock. He looked at his granddaughter.

“Breathe, Lily,” he said. It was not loud. It was just loud enough, the way he used to call me in from the barn at dusk, and it carried across the floor.

She bounced the ball twice. The way I taught her, the way she had done ten thousand times in the cold in Garber with her shoulders square and her eyes on the front of the rim.

She did not look at the stands. She did not look at the bench.

She did not look at her father.

She shot.

The ball went up in a clean, high arc, and I watched it the way you watch something you cannot affect anymore, which I think is the hardest part of being a mother, and the ball dropped through the net without touching the iron.

The second one did the same thing.

Twelve. The scoreboard clicked over, and the crowd came to its feet, and over the top of the noise I heard my father’s stopwatch click once in his hand, like a door closing gently somewhere in a quiet house.

The final score

We won forty-four to thirty-two. I will say it that way because the number matters to the people who watched and does not matter to me at all.

What I remember is not the number. It is the sound in the gym when the buzzer went.

Nine girls in gray shirts with their arms around each other, jumping, in the middle of the floor. Hailey was crying openly.

Sadie had thrown the new leather ball up toward the rafters and watched it come back down. Bree was laughing so hard she had to sit.

And Lily stood very still at the foul line, with both hands at her sides and her braid coming loose over her shoulder, looking at nothing. I walked out and stood in front of her. I did not say anything.

“Did I do it right?” she asked.

“You did it right.”

“Did he see?”

“Everybody saw,” I said.

She nodded. She put her arms around me, and I felt her whole body let go, the way a rope does when the weight comes off the other end, and she said into my shoulder, “I wasn’t scared, Mom.

I just wanted to get there first.”