The Shoes She Served In

I could also tell he was not going to ask them in a gym full of people, because that is Brett.

Between matches June came off the court to get her water bottle, which was a new one from the concession stand, and she saw her dad, and her whole face lit up. She came up the bleachers to him.

He stood up and hugged her, quarry dust and all.

Then he held her back at arm’s length to look at her, the way dads do, and his eyes went down to her feet.

He knew her old shoes. He had bought them.

They were gray with a blue stripe, and he had driven her to Sioux Falls in August to get them. These were white and they were not the same.

“Junie,” he said. “Where are your old shoes?”

He did not say it loud. He did not have to.

The dads around him were already quiet, the way men get quiet at a game between matches, and every one of them heard it.

June looked down at me. I did not nod and I did not shake my head.

It was her story. It was not mine to tell, and it was not mine to keep for her either.

She looked back at her dad.

“They’re at your house,” she said. “By the stairs. Alexa told me to go wait on the porch and then she locked the door and left for the lake. She said to call Mom because Mom’s the one I picked.”

The dads around Brett did not move. Mose set his coffee cup down on the bleacher very carefully. One of the farmers looked at his boots.

“Mom came and got me,” June went on. Her voice did not shake at all. “We went to the store on Main when it opened at seven. She bought me these. She laced them for me because I couldn’t do it. I served first, Dad.”

Brett stood there with his hands on her shoulders. I watched his face. I was married to that face for eleven years, and I had never seen it do what it did then.

It was not anger, exactly. It was something heavier than anger.

It was a man finding out a thing about his own house, in front of men he knew, from his own child, and understanding all at once that she had been alone with it all morning.

“You served first,” he said finally. His voice came out rough. “I wish I’d seen it.”

“You’ll see the next one,” June said. “We play at one.”

He pulled her in again and held her a long time, longer than a fourteen-year-old usually allows in a gym full of her teammates.

She let him. Then she went back down to the court.

Brett sat down. He looked at his hands. Then he got up and went out the side doors into the hallway, and through the glass I could see him standing by the trophy case with his phone to his ear.

He was out there about ten minutes. When he came back in, his face was set in a way I recognized.