My husband refused to walk my 17-year-old daughter, his stepdaughter for nine years, at her high school senior night. “That’s something a real father should do,” he told her. But when her name was announced Thursday evening, her 79-year-old grandfather appeared with his walking cane and proudly accompanied her onto the court.

of them could field a football team alone anymore.

About four hundred kids in the whole building. Kindergarten through twelfth grade.

There were six seniors on the volleyball team that year. When you’ve only got six, everybody in

town knows every one of them by name.

I picked Mason up from his after-school program at four-thirty.

He’d made a poster in art class. GO KAYLEE, with a picture of a volleyball. It looked a lot like a

pumpkin.

“It’s a volleyball,” he told me, before I could say anything. “I ran out of white.”

We got to the gym at five-fifteen. I was wearing my maroon booster club sweatshirt, the one with

the volleyball on the sleeve.

Travis came straight from the shed in his fleece vest with the seed company logo on the chest. He sat down next to me in the front row of the bleachers without saying much.