The Shoes She Served In

He did not sit with the dads this time. He came down and sat next to me in the third row.

“She’s staying at her folks’,” he said quietly. “For a while. I told her not to come back to the house until she’s ready to say she’s sorry to June, to her face, and mean it.”

I did not say anything. I did not feel like I won anything.

Mostly I felt tired, and sad for all three of them, and glad down to my bones that my daughter had had her first serve.

“I’m sorry, Shel,” Brett said. “I should have been the one to drive her. I should have known better than to leave that to anybody. It’s my weekend. It’s my job.”

“You were working,” I said. “You didn’t know.”

“I should have known,” he said. “Alexa told me Thursday night June was being stubborn about the lake. I said leave it. I figured she’d let it go.”

He sat there a while longer, turning his cap around in his hands. Then he stood up and dug in his coat pocket and came out with his key ring.

He worked a key off the ring, the brass one, the house key. It took him a minute because his fingers were stiff from the cold and the truck.

Then he went down to the end of the bench where June was sitting with her team.

I watched him crouch down in front of her in his work boots, right there on the gym floor where I had knelt that morning, and put that key in her hand and fold her fingers over it.

I could not hear what he said. June told me later. He said, “That’s your house too. Nobody locks you out of it. Not ever. You hear me?”

She nodded. She put the key in the toe of her new shoe box, which was still sitting on the bleacher, for safekeeping until the match was over. Then she went out to warm up.

They played their one o’clock against a team from Brookings, and they lost the first set, and they won the second, and they won the third by two points on a ball June set to their big hitter in the middle.

Brett stood up and yelled for that one. So did Mose. So did every dad in that row, and I like to think they were yelling for more than one point.

They lost the semifinal at three to the team from Huron, the tall girls, who got their revenge.

June did not care. She came off that court grinning, sweaty, her braid finally all the way loose.

Coach Patrice found me in the parking lot afterward while June was saying goodbye to the girls. The wind had picked up and she had her hood up.

“I heard,” Coach said. “From one of the dads.”

“I figured,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what I told her before the semi,” Coach said. “I’ve had kids show up to tournaments with all kinds of trouble. That girl came in with brand-new shoes and her hands shaking, and she served a ball I couldn’t have served at her age. You raised a tough kid.”