The Empty Seat in the Top Row

The cowbell wasn’t ringing. Annika Brandvold noticed it the moment she jogged out of the locker room for warmups, before she even looked up. For eleven years, every time she had stepped onto a basketball court, from the fourth-grade rec league to the regional final, there had been a cowbell. One flat, clanging note, followed by two quick ones. Clang. Clang-clang. It came from the top row of the bleachers, from the far end near the band, and it meant her father was there.

Tonight the gym in Carver Falls was packed and roaring, two towns crammed into bleachers built for half as many people, the pep bands trying to drown each other out. Annika ran her layup line and let her eyes drift up to the top row, to the corner by the band. A man in a seed cap sat there. A woman with a baby. Two teenage boys in face paint. No tall, rawboned man in a county-issue orange coat. No cowbell.

“He’s probably parking,” said Bree Larsen, catching a rebound and bouncing it back to her. Bree had been her best friend since kindergarten and could read her face better than her own mother ever had. “It’s snowing like crazy out there.”

“He’s never late,” Annika said.

That was true. Pete Brandvold had not missed a single one of his daughter’s games since she was six years old. Not one. Not the junior high tournament in Spencer when he had a fever of a hundred and two. Not the summer league games in July when the county had him patching asphalt twelve hours a day. Not the away game in Estherville two years ago when his pickup threw a belt on the highway and he walked the last three miles in the dark and came through the gym doors at halftime with grease to his elbows, ringing that cowbell like nothing had happened.

People in Halvorsen joked about it. The Brandvold seat, they called it, top row by the band. Opposing fans had started to recognize the cowbell. Her coach, Linda Haugen, said she could hear it from the locker room and knew exactly when Annika had walked onto the floor.

He had a reason, and everyone in town knew the reason, though nobody ever said it out loud. Annika’s mother had died when Annika was nine. After that, it was just the two of them in the yellow house on Elm Street, and her father had made her one promise at the kitchen table the week after the funeral, in a voice she had never heard him use before or since.

“I’ll be at every game,” he had said. “Every single one. You look up, I’ll be there.”

And for eight years he had been.

The horn sounded. The teams went to their benches. Annika looked up one more time at the top row, and the seed cap and the woman with the baby and the boys in face paint looked back at her, and the seat by the band stayed empty.

“Brandvold.” Coach Haugen was standing in front of her, clipboard pressed to her chest. Her voice was low. “Head in the game. You hear me? Your dad called the school this afternoon. He knows what time it starts. Whatever’s going on, he’s handling it. You handle this.”

“He called?” Annika said. “What did he say?”

Coach Haugen hesitated, just for a second, and something crossed her face that Annika couldn’t read.

“He said to tell you he’s sorry,” she said. “Now get out there.”

Annika walked to center court for the tip with her heart pounding hard and strange in her chest. Sorry. In eight years he had never once had to say sorry, because he had never once not been there.

Outside, the snow was coming sideways across the parking lot now, piling against the tires of the yellow team bus, burying the lines on the highway that led home. Annika did not see any of it. She saw only the referee’s hand tossing the ball into the air, and the empty seat in the top row, and she jumped.