PART 1 — TUESDAY
It happened at the kitchen table on the Tuesday, two days before the game, with the pot roast still going on the stove.
Darcy is seventeen. Middle hitter, four years, has not missed a match since Year Nine including the one where she played with her wrist strapped.
And she asked Garrett the way she asks for everything, which is straight at a person with no run-up.
“Will you walk me out Thursday?”
Her own father has not rung her since the November of 2019.
Garrett has driven that girl to every practice since she was twelve. He built a hitting net in our garden out of scaffold poles and a load of netting off a bloke at work, and he stood in the rain under it for about four hundred hours.
He put his fork down slowly, the way you do when you have been going over something.
And he said: “That walk’s for real dads, Darce.”
And then: “I’m not taking something that isn’t mine to take.”
My daughter said, “Fine.”
She rinsed her plate, put it in the rack, and went upstairs.
She did not slam anything. That is the part that went through me.
Ike is eight and he looked at me across that table with his whole face, waiting for me to fix it.
And I did not say one word.
I had a reason and I want it down properly, because it is the thing I was proudest of that week and I have had to take it apart since.
I could have told Garrett to walk her out. He is a good man and he does what I ask, most of the time, and if I had said it in that kitchen he would have done it.
And I was not having my daughter walk across that gym next to a man who was only there because his wife made him.
He had to pick her himself.
So I waited.
And he went out to the shed and he did not come back in with an answer.
He was out there until about eleven. I know because I was awake.
I went and stood at the back door for a bit at about half nine with a tea towel in my hand.
The light was on in that shed and he was not doing anything. That is what I could see through the window — he was sat on the stool at the bench with his hands on his knees.
Nine years I have watched that man go out there to do something. Mend a mower, fix a bike, sand a thing. There is always a job.
He was sat on a stool in the dark half of it, not touching anything.
And I did not go down the garden.
I have been asked by my sister, more than once, why I did not go down that garden. And the honest answer is that I had already decided what was going on in that shed, and that going down there would have meant finding out something different.
That night Darcy came and stood in my doorway and asked me one thing.
“Can Grandad do it instead?”
My dad is Walter Pruitt. He is seventy-six. Fifty-one years of dairy on the same land, out of it since 2021, and his hip has been going for two years and he does not leave the house without the stick.
I rang him on the Wednesday morning and told him the whole thing. All of it, including what Garrett said, word for word.
And my father did not say one bad word about that man. Not one, and he has never said one since either.
He asked me one question.
“What time do I want to be there?”
PART 2 — THURSDAY
By Thursday evening that gym smelled of popcorn and floor polish, which is the smell of every night of my life since 2019.
Maroon and gold off every rail. Six seniors, walked out to the centre by whoever they had, each one handing a rose to the person beside them.
Darcy was fourth.
I was front row in the booster sweatshirt. Garrett was next to me in his work gilet because he had come straight off site.
He did not know my dad was coming.
I had not told him. That was deliberate and I would like to say I have stopped defending it, and I have not entirely.
At twelve minutes past six the side door went.
And my father was stood in it in the tan sports coat he keeps for funerals and christenings, with his good cap on and his shoes done, and the stick held tight in his right hand.
He came the whole way across that floor on his own and took his place next to my girl.
Garrett turned and looked at me.
He did not say anything. He looked at me for about three seconds and then he turned back round and faced the floor.
And then the announcer read it out.
“Number seventeen, Darcy — escorted tonight by her grandfather, Mr. Walter Pruitt.”
She put her arm through his.
They went slowly because slow is all my dad has left.
Stick. Step. Step. And the rubber tip of that cane squeaking on the polish, which you could hear because by then it was the only noise in that building.
A man in the top row stood up.
Then the row under him. Then the whole home side, and then the visitors’ side, and two of the other team’s players, and the woman who does the scoreboard.
My father did not look up once. Not at the stand, not at the noise. He kept his eyes down on the floor in front of them, the same way he did for fifty-one years in a parlour at half four in the morning.
It is about eleven metres from the baseline to the centre circle.
See more on the next page
