Her Father Never Missed a Game Until That Friday

Seventeen Years Later

Seventeen years later, in a February snowstorm, Annika Brandvold drove north on Interstate 35 from Des Moines with her eight-year-old daughter asleep in the back seat and a folded speech in the pocket of her coat.

She was thirty-five now. She was a physical therapist at a hospital in Des Moines, married to a high school history teacher named Owen, and the mother of a gap-toothed, stubborn, fiercely competitive little girl named Karen, who played in a third-grade basketball league on Saturday mornings and had already been called for traveling more times than anyone could count.

Her father was retiring. After forty-one years with the county road department, Pete Brandvold was hanging up his orange coat, and the town of Halvorsen was throwing him a dinner at the American Legion hall. Mitch Kaldahl, long retired himself and now eighty-two, had called Annika in December to ask if she would say a few words.

“He doesn’t know you’re speaking,” Mitch had said. “He thinks it’s just the county supervisor and a plaque. He’ll hate it. Do it anyway.”

The interstate was open the whole way, freshly plowed and salted. Annika noticed it the way she always noticed it now, every time she drove in snow. The clear lanes. The sanded bridges. Somewhere ahead of her, she knew, somebody was out in a plow with the beacon turning, alone in the white, making sure people got home. She had never once since that winter driven on a plowed road without thinking about who had plowed it.

They exited at Mason City and took Highway 9 west. Annika didn’t take the long way anymore. Neither did her father.

At the Rush Creek curve she slowed down, the way she always did. The guardrail had been replaced again a few years back, all of it this time, new steel gleaming against the snowbanks. But on the third post from the bridge there was still a blue ribbon, bright and new. Her father changed it every fall. Annika changed it every spring. They had never once talked about the schedule. It simply happened.

In the back seat, her daughter stirred and sat up, rubbing her eyes.

“Is that Grandma Karen’s ribbon?” she asked.

“That’s the one,” Annika said.

Little Karen pressed her nose to the window as they went past. “Grandpa says that’s where he walked in the snow with a flashlight. To get you home on the bus.”

Annika looked at her daughter in the rearview mirror, surprised. “He told you that?”

“He tells me every time,” Karen said, with the weary patience of an eight-year-old. “He says you missed a shot.”

Annika laughed out loud.

The Legion hall in Halvorsen was packed by six o’clock. It seemed like half the town had come. The county road crew sat at two long tables near the front, men Annika had poured coffee for at the Corner Café when she was sixteen, now gray and thick-waisted, with their wives and grandchildren. Coach Haugen was there, retired from coaching but still wearing a Lady Vikings sweatshirt. Bree Larsen, now Bree Holm, had driven in from Minneapolis with her own kids. And in the back corner, in a wheelchair now but wearing the same red flannel shirt he had worn to every away game for twenty-two years, sat Duane Ostrem. When he saw Annika come in, he lifted one hand and waved.

Her father sat at the head table in a sport coat that was too tight across the shoulders, looking deeply uncomfortable, picking at a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes. When Annika walked in, his face lit up, and then, when he saw the folded paper in her hand, it went suspicious.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Nothing,” Annika said, kissing his cheek. “Eat your potatoes.”