The Shoes She Served In

“Her dad did too,” I said, and I meant it.

Coach nodded and walked to her car. I stood there in the wind a minute and let it blow my face dry.

June rode home with me that night instead of going back to Brett’s.

Brett asked her if that was what she wanted and she said yes, just for tonight, and he said that was fine, and he would see her Sunday for church.

On the drive home she held the shoe box in her lap with both arms around it. The key was still inside.

So was the receipt, which she had taken out of my vest pocket at some point when I was not looking.

“Mom,” she said, somewhere around the elevator, with the sun going down orange behind us. “Thank you for not yelling at her.”

I kept my eyes on the road. “Would it have helped?”

“No,” she said. “It would have been about you then. Instead of about the serve.”

Fourteen years old. I do not know where she gets it. Her grandma, probably.

Here is the rest of it, because people always ask.

Alexa did not come back to Brett’s that week, or the next. She stayed with her folks on the lake and then with a sister in town.

By the end of March her things were out of Brett’s house. Brett told me that much and nothing more, which is like him.

I never said a word to her. I passed her once in April in the grocery store, in the cereal aisle.

She saw me and looked away, and I let her. There was nothing to say that would have done anybody any good.

About six weeks after the tournament, June got a text from her. June showed it to me at the kitchen table.

It said, I’m sorry about your shoes. I’m sorry about the porch. I was wrong.

June looked at it for a long time. Then she wrote back, Thank you. That was all.

She did not tell her it was okay, and she did not tell her it was not. I was proud of her for both.

Brett started driving June to every tournament himself after that. He traded Saturday runs with another driver so he would be off.

He sits two rows up with the dads, Mose and the farmers, and they all know him now.

June still has the key on her lanyard, the brass one. She still wears the white shoes.

They have a scuff on the left toe now from a dig she made in May, and she will not let me clean it off.

And the receipt from Glenna’s register, a hundred and fifty-nine dollars and twenty-eight cents, printed at 7:09 on a Saturday morning in March, she folded in quarters and tucked into the toe of her volleyball bag.

I have never once told her to take it out.

She still keeps the receipt in the toe of her bag, for luck.