state champion balls, signed by all the girls on the winning team.
A young boy cries out, having been hit in the mouth by one of the softballs. His mother, with thin blond hair and a coffee mug in her hand, says, You’ll get better, sweetheart, I promise. She looks off absently into the crowd.
Another mother, with three children in tow, tells the child in the middle, You never listen. Is there a reason you never goddamn listen?
There’s a West Fargo Packers football float—an Astroturf end zone festooned with balloons and boys in jerseys tossing footballs among themselves. Cheerleaders in black leggings and green-and-white Packers shirts walk behind it, juddering green pom-poms in their hands. There are mascots and little Somali girls holding coupons for $25 gift cards to Aaron’s, a kitchen and appliance store. There are Boy Scouts carrying a flag like a coffin; ebullient girls in sunglasses, dressed like grapes and bananas; sleek sports cars driving slowly down the avenue. All along the sidewalks are the spectators, the folding chairs, the bald heads splattered with sunscreen like fried eggs, little girls with shower-wet roots, preteens on phones. There are beer-drinking and water-drinking parents in West Fargo sweatshirts and NDSU sweatshirts, waving to paraders waving from the floats, the sort of community that is small enough for people to know everybody yet large enough for them to feel comfortable talking behind one another’s backs.
A local newscaster tells her cameraman that Aaron Knodel is scheduled to be on the West Fargo Public School System float. Nobody is advertising this fact, because of the recent events, but certainly he has a right to be on it—Teacher of the Year. As in a game of telephone, the news oozes.
Maggie is not at the parade. She’s waitressing at Perkins. She’s been waitressing since high school though in high school it was at Buffalo Wild Wings, busing orange wings sizzling on plates and even if the smell got all over you it was better than the smell of Perkins, which is older and blander but somehow more permeating. Perkins smells like a cafeteria. The scrambled eggs are solid and pale. Once at Buffalo Wild Wings Aaron came in for takeout but to the best of Maggie’s knowledge he has never been to Perkins.
There’s a freight train track in the distance. Sometimes she walks to the window in her section and watches the trains go by. Today, like every day, her hair is long and done and lovely. She looks out of place carrying dove-colored eggs to ornery customers. A skinny waitress with scars across her face is talking about her child, who hasn’t grown an inch or gained a pound since he was six months old. Now he’s fifteen months old. It’s curious, she knows. Not an ounce. The doctor said, Oh my goodness, what is going on?
Maggie hears a train and walks to the window. She wants to get out of here. It’s the only way to forget. She still talks about Aaron as if their togetherness is fresh although it’s been over for more than six years. She kept thinking, What if I’m betraying him? What if he still has the same feelings, and he just didn’t know what to do? She feels stupid and silly for believing that he loved her. She is lonely in a deeper way than many other twenty-three-year-olds. She’s on Tinder but every guy she matches with asks to meet immediately. When guys find out her name, they say, Oh, I didn’t know you were such a freaky slut. She doesn’t trust anyone, but there is also the danger that she still might trust too much. She is without a father. When girls are without fathers, they look under every manhole cover. The other day she told a friend she just wanted Aaron to spend one night in jail, one night when he was the wrong one and she was the right one, one night when he paid for what he has done to her life.
Would it be enough, her friend asked, if his wife left him? If his world crumbled, would that be a salve, and would it be enough?
She thought for a moment. Her answer was not wrong but the world, she knew, was too oblivious to the trajectory of womanly pain to fully understand it without demeaning her. Even women would have trouble. Or women would be the ones to have the most trouble.