Her Father Never Missed a Game Until That Friday

The Rush Creek Curve

Duane drove her home. Neither of them spoke much on the way. The fields on both sides of the road were white and blinding in the noon sun, and the sky was the clear, hard blue that always came after a storm, as though nothing bad had ever happened under it.

When they reached the edge of town, Annika asked him to keep going.

“Where?” Duane said.

“Rush Creek,” she said.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned north toward Highway 9 without a word.

The Rush Creek curve was eleven miles east of Halvorsen, where the highway dropped down off a long, open rise and bent sharply to the right to cross the creek on an old concrete bridge. There was a farm field on the left and a steep bank on the right, falling away to a line of bare willows and the frozen creek below. A metal guardrail ran along the outside of the curve. Annika had seen it only once since she was nine, on the day of her mother’s funeral, from the back seat of her grandmother’s car, with her eyes squeezed shut.

Duane pulled onto the shoulder just past the bridge and turned off the engine.

Annika got out. The wind was down to nothing now. The snowbanks on either side of the road stood taller than she was, sculpted into sharp curling shapes by the plow blade. She walked slowly back along the shoulder toward the curve, her boots crunching. She didn’t know what she was looking for until she found it.

Near the middle of the curve, on the outside, a short stretch of the guardrail was newer than the rest. Shinier. The posts were a different color. Someone had tied a faded blue ribbon around one of them, so old and weathered that it was almost gray, and fastened to the ribbon with a twist tie was a small laminated card, the kind they made at the funeral home. Annika had one exactly like it in her jewelry box at home. She did not need to read it to know what it said.

Karen Aune Brandvold. 1966–2000.

She had never known this was here. She had never known anyone had tied a ribbon. She stood looking at it, and slowly, in the snow at the base of the post, she began to see the footprints.

They were big boot prints, half filled with blown snow but still visible, running along the very edge of the road, right up against the guardrail. They went the whole length of the curve, and then they turned around and came back. And then they went the whole length again.

At the post with the ribbon, the footprints stopped. There was a place where the snow was pressed down, flattened in a rough circle, as if someone had stood there for a while. Or knelt.

Annika stood in the empty road and finally understood.

Her father had not been able to drive past this curve for eight years. He had taken the long way to everything. He had given up the road crew’s coffee table at the café so he wouldn’t have to hear them talk about the Rush Creek drifts. He had asked for the south routes. And on the one night that mattered more than any other night of her life, he had asked for this stretch. He had walked this curve on foot in a blizzard, at midnight, with a flashlight, finding the edge of the road with his boots, the edge her mother had not been able to find. He had walked it twice. Then he had knelt in the snow beside her mother’s ribbon and waited with his lights on while his daughter’s bus went past, safely, and he had rung his cowbell once.

He had missed her game to make sure this road did not take her too.

Annika knelt down in the snow beside the footprints. She did not cry right away. She put her hand flat in the pressed-down place where he had knelt, and she stayed there a long time. Behind her, she heard Duane’s truck door open and close, and his footsteps on the gravel, and then they stopped a respectful distance away, and he waited.

When she finally stood up, her knees were soaked through and her face was wet and she did not care at all.

“Take me home, please, Mr. Ostrem,” she said. “I need to talk to my dad.”