There had been no girls' team in Cutler Springs then. Dani wrestled boys in a youth club that met in the cafeteria of the middle school, on mats that smelled like a hundred years of feet. She got pinned so many times that first winter that Tom had privately wondered if they should make her quit, for her own sake, and had said so once to Lena, and Lena had looked at him the way she'd looked at him yesterday, and he had not said it again. By the second winter Dani was pinning some of them back. By eighth grade the boys in her weight class had started finding reasons to forfeit. And then the state had grown its girls' program year by year until there were enough girls at Cutler Springs High to field a real team, coached by a woman named Bea Ortega who had wrestled in college back east and who had driven to Tom's house the summer before Dani's freshman year to sit at the kitchen table and say, with no preamble, "Your daughter is going to win a state title, and I'd like to be in her corner when she does it."
Lena had cried at that. Tom had shaken Ortega's hand and offered her a beer and then had to leave early for a callout.
He thought about that now, crawling up the long grade toward Snoqualmie Pass with snow banked along the shoulders and the chain-up signs flashing but not yet in effect. He thought about all the leaving early. It had never felt like a choice, any single time. The power went out; you went. He'd been proud of that. He was still proud of it. He'd climbed poles in winds that bent the trees sideways and been tied off forty feet above a flooded road in the dark with a hot line humming a foot from his face, and he had never once been afraid, not really, because you were always tied in. That was the first thing they taught you. Before your hands, before your feet, before anything, you check your strap. You never climb without being tied in to something that will hold.
He didn't know when he had stopped checking the strap at home.
Lena hadn't left him for anybody. He knew that. People in town had assumed it—he'd seen it in the faces at the hardware store, at church, at the gas station—and he'd let them assume it, because it was easier than the truth, which was that she had left because she was lonely in her own house. She'd told him so, last July, sitting on the back step with a glass of iced tea sweating in her hand. She'd said, "I'm so tired of doing everything alone with you in the next room." And he