The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

The handshake line

After a game the two teams file past each other and the coaches shake hands. It is a custom older than any of us, it takes fifteen seconds, and I had been dreading those fifteen seconds for two months.

I walked down the line, past the navy warmups with the implement dealer’s name, past girls who looked at me with a kind of puzzled respect.

They shook the hands of my girls, and my girls shook theirs, and somebody said good game in every possible tone of voice.

Then I reached Greg. He stood at the end of the line with his clipboard under his arm, the same one, wearing a face I had seen on him once before, the day they buried his father, empty and slack and very tired.

I put out my hand. He took it. His palm was dry and cold, and he looked at me for just a moment as if there were something he meant to say, and then I saw him decide against it.

“Good game, coach,” I said.

“Good game,” he said.

That was all. We shook once and let go, the way you do with any coach in any league in any gym in America, and I moved on down the line. It was exactly what I would have done for anyone.

I did not say anything to him about Lily. I did not say anything about the clipboard or the cut.

Whatever I had to say to Greg did not belong in that gym, that day, in front of those people, and I think that was the hardest thing I have ever not done.

Behind me, my daughter went through the line. I did not turn around, but I heard her shake the hand of the girl who had taken her spot and say “good game, Madison,” and then I heard her get to the end.

I heard nothing. No word, no pause. When I did turn, she had already passed him and was walking toward the bench with her water bottle, and her eyes were on her friends.

She had not looked back at him, and I do not think she ever has.

What the county did

There is a trophy for the county tournament, a little gold figure on a wooden base with the year on a plate.

They handed it to Lily and Hailey together, one on each side, and Hailey held it over her head like a woman who had won the lottery.

Then the parents came. I had not planned for it. They came down out of the bleachers in twos and threes, in their church coats and their feed caps, and they stood around me in a loose circle in the middle of the floor.

A farmer with a face like a split fence rail took off his cap. “Ma’am,” he said. “My girl’s in fifth grade, sixth next year. She wants to play. Would you take her?”

“I would have to ask the girls,” I said, which was a ridiculous thing to say, and he nodded anyway. A woman behind him said her daughter was in seventh. Another said hers was a fourth grader who was already five-foot-three.

By the time the gym emptied, I had a list on the back of a walking-taco napkin, in four different handwritings.

Fourteen names, from six families, and two of the mothers asked what it would cost, and I said forty dollars a week for the gym, split however they liked.

My father was the last to leave. He sat at the scorer’s table until the lights were half off, putting the stopwatch back in his coat pocket and writing a final line on the legal pad in pencil.

I looked over his shoulder. He had written the date and the score, and beneath them the nine names. After the last one he had added a tenth line, and it said, in his small carpenter’s letters: Coach.