I didn’t have a good answer.
I still don’t. Not entirely.
On Thursday, I cleaned teeth from eight to four.
Mrs. Bauer, who’s eighty-four and has had the same partial plate since the Carter administration, told me she’d be at the game.
“I wouldn’t miss senior night,” she said, around my mirror and my scaler. “I haven’t missed one since my Jim’s sister played. That was 1974. They played in bloomers back then. Or near enough.”
Everybody goes to senior night in our town.
Our school’s a consolidated district. Three little towns that merged back in the nineties when none 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.
