"Mama says the fridge is where you put things so you don't forget them." Rosie touched the regional bracket with one finger, right on Dani's name. "So if it's on the fridge, it's important."
"That's a pretty good rule."
"I know," Rosie said seriously. "I'm going to remember it."
* * *
They left Cutler Springs at ten minutes after four on Saturday morning, in the dark, with the heater blasting and Rosie buckled into her booster seat in the back of the crew cab, asleep before they reached the highway. Tom drove north up the valley past the black rows of hop trellises, empty wire strung between poles like the bones of a building, and then up the canyon toward Ellensburg, where the river ran beside them in the headlights, and then west onto I-90 toward the mountains.
He had driven this road a thousand times. He had driven it in convoys of utility trucks with amber lights going, heading to the west side after a windstorm, and coming back three days later so tired the lane lines doubled. He had driven it with Dani as a baby screaming in her car seat for two straight hours because Lena's mother was in the hospital in Everett, and Lena had sat in the back with her finger in Dani's fist, singing the same three lines of the same song until all of them were hoarse.
He had not, he realized somewhere around Cle Elum, ever driven it to watch Dani wrestle. Lena had always done that. Lena had done those drives in her Corolla with a cooler full of string cheese and grapes and Dani doing homework in the passenger seat. Tom had been working, or on call, or just tired, or—and this was the part he didn't like to look at directly—just aware that this was a thing that belonged to the two of them, Lena and Dani, and that he had not been invited into it so much as he had failed to ask.
When Dani was ten, she had come home from a summer rec program and announced that she was going to wrestle. Tom had laughed. He remembered that clearly, because he remembered the look on her face. He hadn't laughed meanly. He'd laughed the way you laugh when a kid says she's going to be an astronaut, or a mermaid. Wrestling was a thing he associated with the boys he'd gone to high school with, with cauliflower ears and spitting into cups and cutting weight in garbage bags. He'd said, "Honey, they don't even have a girls' team."
"So I'll wrestle the boys," Dani had said.
And Lena, who was drying a pot at the sink, had set it down and said, "Okay. Let's find out where."
That was Lena. She didn't argue with you. She just went and found out where.