Her Father Never Missed a Game Until That Friday

Riding Along

The next storm came three weeks later, in the middle of March, the last real blizzard of the winter. It was a Saturday, and when her father’s phone rang at four in the morning, Annika was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table in her warmest clothes.

“I want to come,” she said when he came downstairs.

He looked at her for a long moment. County rules said no passengers. Everybody knew that. Everybody also knew that nobody at the shed was going to say a word to Pete Brandvold about anything that winter.

“Bring a thermos,” he said.

She rode with him for eleven hours. She had never been inside the cab of a county plow before, and she was surprised by how high up it was, how loud, how the whole huge machine shook and roared when the blade bit into a drift. Her father drove it the way she played point guard, with total concentration and almost no wasted motion, his eyes constantly moving, reading the road, the wind, the fence lines, the snow ahead. He talked on the radio in a short, calm code with the other drivers. He didn’t talk much to her. He didn’t need to.

She began to see what he saw. The way a drift started on the lee side of a grove of trees. The way the wind came across a section line in a sudden wall. The way certain stretches of road, low places, curves, the approaches to bridges, filled faster than anywhere else and had to be cut twice and three times. She saw how lonely it was, out in the white with just the beacon turning, and how much it mattered. Every car they passed, every pickup creeping along behind them in the plowed lane, was somebody trying to get home.

Around two in the afternoon, he turned north onto Highway 9.

Annika saw his hands tighten on the wheel. She didn’t say anything. They drove east in silence, the wing blade throwing a long curling wave of snow into the ditch, until the road dipped down off the rise and the Rush Creek curve opened up in front of them.

Her father slowed the plow to a crawl. He cut the curve once, carefully, then backed up and cut it again. Then he stopped on the shoulder past the bridge and put the plow in park and sat there with his hands on the wheel, the beacon turning above them, gold and dark and gold.

Annika reached into the bag at her feet and took out a new ribbon. She had bought it at the fabric store in Spencer the week before. It was bright blue, the same color her mother’s favorite sweater had been.

“I thought we could change it,” she said. “The old one’s pretty faded.”

Her father looked at the ribbon in her hand for a long time. Then he nodded once, and they got out of the plow together into the wind.

They tied it to the post side by side, their gloves clumsy on the knot. Her father straightened the little laminated card. Then they stood there for a minute in the blowing snow, not saying anything, his arm around her shoulders.

“I used to come out here,” he said finally. “The first couple years. In the summer, when you were at Grandma’s. I’d just sit on the guardrail. I tied that first ribbon. I never told anybody.”

“I know,” Annika said. “I figured.”

He squeezed her shoulders. “She’d have loved watching you play,” he said. “She’d have been louder than me. She’d have been worse than the cowbell.”

Annika laughed, and it turned into something else halfway through, and he held on to her.

That night, back home, the house warm and the snow still falling outside, Annika sat at the kitchen table and filled out the last of her college applications. She had been putting off one question for weeks, the essay prompt that asked her to write about a person who had shaped her life. She had started it a dozen times and thrown each one away.

This time she wrote it in one sitting. She wrote about a cowbell and an empty seat in the top row. She wrote about a man walking a curve on foot in a blizzard. She called it Roads Were Bad.

She got into every school she applied to.