Her Father Never Missed a Game Until That Friday

Four Days of Silence

She didn’t speak to him for four days.

It wasn’t a dramatic silence. Annika was not the kind of girl who slammed doors. She simply stopped talking. She got up in the morning and ate her cereal standing at the counter and went to school. She came home and did her homework in her room. When her father said good morning, she said morning. When he asked how school was, she said fine. When he knocked on her door on Sunday night and asked if she wanted to go to the Pizza Ranch the way they always did on Sundays, she said she wasn’t hungry, and she heard him stand outside the door for a long time before he walked away.

The thing she could not get past was that he hadn’t explained. Roads were bad. That was the whole speech. He had not apologized again, not really, not to her face. He had not told her why the county could not have found someone else to drive a plow for one night. He had not said he was sorry he missed the biggest game of her life, the game that ended her season, maybe the last game she would ever play in front of the whole town. He had gone to bed.

On Monday, the Halvorsen Herald ran a photograph of her missed shot on the front page of the sports section. Brandvold’s Last-Second Try Falls Short. Somebody had put it on her locker with tape. She knew they meant it kindly. She took it down and folded it into her backpack and didn’t look at it again.

Her grandmother came over on Tuesday after school, the way she did twice a week. Signe Aune was her mother’s mother, seventy-four years old and barely five feet tall, a retired school cook with flour permanently in the creases of her knuckles. She let herself in the back door without knocking, set a pan of bars on the counter, and looked at Annika sitting at the kitchen table with her chemistry homework, and said, “Well. You look like a wet cat.”

Annika didn’t answer.

Signe sat down across from her and folded her hands. She had a way of waiting that made people talk, and after a minute or two, Annika talked. She told her about the empty seat in the top row. About the shot. About the call to the school, and he’s sorry, and roads were bad, and four in the morning.

“He promised,” Annika said. Her voice cracked on it, which made her angrier. “After Mom. He sat right there at this table and promised me. Every game. And the one time it really mattered, he picked a snowplow.”

Signe didn’t say anything for a while. She looked out the kitchen window at the backyard, where the snow from Friday still lay in long, sculpted drifts against the fence.

“That was a bad storm,” she said finally. “Worst since the one in 2000.”

Annika went still.

She knew what storm her grandmother meant. Everybody in her family knew. The storm in December of 2000 was the one that had come up fast out of the northwest on a Thursday afternoon, the one her mother had been driving home in from her shift at the hospital in Spencer. The one that had drifted Highway 9 shut at the Rush Creek curve before the county plows could reach it.

Annika had been nine. She remembered the sheriff’s car in the driveway. She remembered her father sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboards, his knees pulled up, making a sound she had never heard a grown man make. She did not remember much else about that winter. She had spent the eight years since then very carefully not remembering.

“What does that have to do with Friday?” she asked, though something in her chest had gone cold and tight.

Signe looked at her granddaughter with an expression that was very gentle and very sad.

“Have you asked him?” she said. “Where he was? Not ‘why weren’t you there.’ Where he was.”

“Not ‘why weren’t you there.’ Where he was.”

“He said the roads were bad.”

“Your father,” Signe said, picking her words carefully, “has never been a man who says much about the things that matter most to him. Your mother used to say getting Pete Brandvold to talk about his feelings was like getting a cat to take a bath.” She almost smiled. “But he isn’t a liar. And he isn’t careless with you, Annika. Not ever. Not one day of your life.”

She stood, patted her granddaughter’s hand, and put on her coat.

“You might ask Mitch Kaldahl,” she said at the door. “He comes into the café Saturday mornings. Him and the other county boys. They know where everybody was Friday night. I’d bet you a pan of bars they’ve got opinions.”