Her Father Never Missed a Game Until That Friday

What He Said in the Kitchen

Her father was in the garage when she got home, changing the oil in his pickup, lying on a creeper underneath it with only his boots sticking out. She could hear the radio playing on the workbench, a farm report from Mason City. She stood in the doorway for a while, watching his boots, working up the nerve.

“Dad,” she said.

The creeper rolled out. Pete Brandvold looked up at her from the concrete floor, a socket wrench in his hand, a smear of oil across one cheek. He saw her wet knees and her red eyes and the expression on her face, and he went very still.

“Who told you?” he said quietly.

“Everybody,” Annika said. “Mitch. Duane. Grandma, kind of. I went out to Rush Creek.”

Her father closed his eyes. He lay there on the creeper for a long moment, and then he sat up slowly and set the wrench down on the floor beside him, very carefully, as though it might break.

“I asked them not to,” he said.

“I know. Why?”

He didn’t answer. He reached for a rag and wiped his hands, taking his time, cleaning each finger. Annika had seen him do this a thousand times. It was what he did when he was trying to find words.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said again, and her voice broke. “I didn’t talk to you for four days. I thought you didn’t care. I thought you picked a stupid plow over me. Why would you let me think that?”

Her father put down the rag.

“Because if I told you,” he said slowly, “you’d have spent the rest of your life thinking about it every time you got on a bus.”

She stared at him.

“You were seventeen years old and you’d just lost the biggest game of your life,” he said. “You didn’t need to know the road home was that bad. You didn’t need to know your old man was scared out of his mind. You needed to be mad about a basketball game. That’s what seventeen-year-olds get to be mad about. I wanted you to get to have that.” He looked down at his hands. “I figured you’d be mad at me for a while and then you’d get over it, and you’d never have to think about that curve.”

Annika came down the step into the garage and sat on an overturned bucket across from him, the way she had sat when she was little and handed him tools.

“Dad,” she said. “Tell me about Mom. About that night.”

He was quiet for so long she thought he wouldn’t answer. The radio on the workbench switched to an ad for seed corn.

“I was on the plow that night too,” he said finally. “December of 2000. South routes. I got the call over the radio from dispatch. They said there was a car off the road at Rush Creek. They didn’t say whose. I knew anyway. I knew what time her shift ended.” He swallowed. “The stretch hadn’t been plowed yet. We were short a driver that night. Guy called in sick. That stretch was supposed to be cleared by six. Nobody got to it till eight.”

He looked up at her, and his eyes were full.

“For eight years I’ve thought about that,” he said. “Every time it snowed. If somebody had been out there. If somebody had been on that stretch. If I’d asked for it.” He shook his head. “So when they said the interstate was closing and you were going to be on 9, coming through Rush Creek, at night, in a ground blizzard, there wasn’t any choice to make, Nik. I could sit in the top row and watch you play, or I could make sure you got home. I couldn’t do both.”

“I could sit in the top row and watch you play, or I could make sure you got home. I couldn’t do both.”

His voice cracked.

“I couldn’t lose you on that road too. I couldn’t.”

Annika got off the bucket and knelt down on the cold concrete floor of the garage and put her arms around her father, oil and all, and he held on to her so tightly she could barely breathe. Neither of them said anything for a long time. The radio played on. Outside, the late-afternoon sun came slanting through the garage window and lay across the floor in a long gold stripe.

When they finally let go, her father wiped his face with the back of his wrist and laughed a little, a rough, embarrassed sound.

“For the record,” he said. “It was a good look. That last shot. It was the right shot. Coach drew it up right.”

“You were listening,” Annika said.

“Every second.” He reached up to the workbench and took down something she had not seen since the regional final, something she had assumed he’d left at home that night. It was the cowbell. “Rang it in the cab when you hit your threes,” he said. “Duane said he could hear it on the radio.”