Her Father Never Missed a Game Until That Friday

What Duane Heard on the Radio

Annika did not remember walking home from the café. She remembered taking off her apron and Lou waving her out the door without a word. She remembered the cold on her face. And then she was standing at the end of a long gravel driveway two miles outside of town, in front of a tidy white farmhouse with a red flannel shirt hanging on a hook inside the storm door, and she didn’t entirely know how she had gotten there.

Duane Ostrem opened the door before she knocked. He was wearing reading glasses and slippers and holding a newspaper, and he looked at her face for about two seconds and stepped back to let her in.

“Mitch called,” he said. “Said you might come by. Sit down. I’ll get you some cocoa. You look like you walked.”

“I did,” Annika said.

His kitchen was warm and smelled like coffee and wood smoke. His wife, June, a small, cheerful woman in a sweatshirt with a cardinal on it, put a mug of cocoa in front of Annika and then quietly left the room. Duane sat down across the table from her and took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“I figured somebody’d tell you eventually,” he said. “Pete made all of us promise not to. Coach Haugen, me, the boys at the shed. He said you had enough to carry without carrying that too.” He shook his head. “I told him he was wrong. But it was his to decide.”

“Please,” Annika said. “Just tell me.”

So he told her.

Her father had called Coach Haugen at the school at three o’clock that afternoon. He told her the interstate was going to close, maybe during the game, and when it did, Highway 9 was going to be the only way home. He asked her to have the bus ready to leave the minute the game ended. No showers, no pizza, no standing around. Then he called Duane at home and gave him a CB channel and told him to keep the radio on.

“He was waiting for us at the county line when we came out of Carver Falls,” Duane said. “Parked on the shoulder with his beacon going. He came on the radio and said, ‘Duane, it’s Pete. Just follow my lights and don’t pass me no matter what. I’ll get you home.’”

For thirty-eight miles, Pete Brandvold had plowed Highway 9 at fifteen miles an hour, a hundred yards ahead of the bus, with his wing blade down and his beacon turning. Every few minutes he came on the radio. Drift coming up on the right. Bridge is icy, take it slow. Gust coming across the section line, hold your wheel.

“He never stopped talking,” Duane said. “Two and a half hours. I think he was afraid if he went quiet, I’d think something was wrong.” He paused. “And somewhere in the middle of all that, he asked me how the game went.”

Annika looked up.

“He had the radio broadcast on in the cab,” Duane said. “KHLV out of Spencer. He’d listened to the whole thing on his way to the county line. Every quarter. He said, ‘She hit two threes in the third, Duane. Did you see it? Did you see her steal it at half court?’” Duane’s voice thickened. “He was so proud of you, kiddo. He couldn’t stop talking about it. And then he asked me if you were okay. About the last shot. He said, ‘Is she taking it hard? Tell her it was a good look. It was the right shot.’”

Annika put her hands around the mug of cocoa and held it tightly, because they had started to shake.

“Then we got to Rush Creek,” Duane said.

He was quiet for a long time.

“You remember we stopped,” he said finally. “Around midnight. For a while.”

“You said he was walking it,” Annika whispered. “I heard you. I didn’t know what it meant.”

“The curve was drifted shut,” Duane said. “Four, five feet, all the way across. He’d plowed it once and it had blown shut again behind him. Visibility was zero. He couldn’t see the edges of the road. The creek’s right there, twenty feet down, past the guardrail.” He looked at her. “Your dad got out of the plow. In that wind. And he walked that curve on foot, with a flashlight, finding the edge of the road with his boots. He walked it twice. Then he got back in the plow and cut it open and stayed right there with his lights on till I was through.”

Annika could not speak.

“He came on the radio after,” Duane said. “Once we were past. I won’t ever forget it. He said, ‘You’re through, Duane. You’re through.’ And then he didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear him breathing.” Duane wiped his eyes. “And then I heard a cowbell. Just once. Clang. Then he said, ‘Get her home.’”

“You’re through, Duane. You’re through.”