The Shoes She Served In

My phone rang at 6:32 on a Saturday morning in March, and I knew before I picked it up that something was wrong, because June never calls on her dad’s weekends.

She texts. She sends me a picture of the dog or a thumbs up.

A call at 6:32 meant trouble, and I was already sitting up in bed with my feet on the cold floor.

“Mom.” Her voice was thin and broken up, the way it gets when she has been crying long enough that she cannot catch her breath. “Mom, I’m on the porch at Dad’s. Alexa locked the door and left.”

I asked her to say it again, slower, because I thought I had heard it wrong.

She said it again. Alexa had locked the door and driven away, and June was outside on the step.

“Where’s your bag?” I asked, and I already knew the answer from how hard she was crying. “Junie, where are your shoes?”

“Inside,” she said. “By the stairs. Everything’s inside, Mom. My shoes and my knee pads and my water bottle. I’ve got my phone and that’s it.”

I want to tell you I stayed calm. I did, mostly, on the outside.

On the inside I was standing in my bedroom with one sock on and my heart going like a hammer on a tin roof.

My name is Shelby Krumm. I was thirty-nine that spring, a hairdresser in Mitchell, South Dakota, with a two-chair shop in a strip on the east side of town and a Saturday book that filled up three weeks ahead.

June was fourteen. She was a setter, which if you do not know volleyball is the girl who touches the ball second and puts it up for everyone else to hit. It is a thinking position. It suits her.

She had tried out for the travel team two years in a row and been cut both times.

The first year she cried in the car. The second year she did not cry, which was worse.

That second winter she practiced against the garage door every night after supper. Set, set, set, a hundred times, until the neighbor across the street started waving at her from his recliner window.

The third year she made it. Coach Patrice Berg called the house herself on a Tuesday night in November, and June stood in the kitchen with the phone against her ear and her free hand over her mouth.

So that Saturday was not just any Saturday. It was her first regional tournament with the team, at the high school gym in town. Check-in was 7:30. Their first match was at 8:30.

And on Thursday, Coach Patrice had pulled June aside after practice and told her she would be serving first. First rotation, first ball of the first match. June had not slept right since.

“Okay,” I said into the phone. “Okay, baby. Stay right there. I’m coming. Is your dad there?”

“He left at like five,” she said. “He’s hauling. I called him and it went to voicemail. I called him twice.”