We drove the boys to Pasco

I'll do this one time and then I'd like to be done with it.

First off, it wasn't Pasco. The tournament was at the Toyota Center and the Toyota Center is in Kennewick. The rooms were in Pasco because that's where the team block was, so all weekend everybody said Pasco, and I've said Pasco ever since. It was Kennewick.

And it's an hour and twenty minutes. People in this valley will tell you two hours to the Tri-Cities. It's an hour and twenty if you don't stop in Prosser.

That Friday it took three and a half.

The reason we drove separate from the van is the boys had a math final at one that the school wouldn't move for a wrestling meet. Van went at noon without them. Weigh-ins weren't until seven the next morning so there was no hurry in it.

Dale's got a Tundra. Nice truck. It's a crew cab with an empty bed and he runs street tires on it, so we took mine. Mine's an 11 Silverado with 248 on the clock. I had eight bags of softener salt over the back axle since November and Duratracs with about half the tread left. Not studs. I've had this told back to me with studs in it and I don't know where that came from.

We pulled out of the high school lot at 4:15. It was doing nothing at Grandview. By Sunnyside it was going sideways.

Wyatt was asleep before Prosser. Cody made it to about Benton City. Cody sleeps with his mouth open, same as his mother.

Past Prosser you've got open ground either side and the wind comes down off that ridge where the turbines are and picks up whatever's already on the ground and puts it back in the air. Ground blizzard. Nothing coming out of the sky and you still can't see your own hood.

Everybody went to 25. Then everybody went to whatever the semi up front was doing, which was about 18. I had my hazards on from milepost 84 to the 182 split and I don't run hazards.

There was a Corolla nose-down in the median around 88. Could have been 90. It was past the rest area either way. Trooper was already on it and a girl was standing outside the car with no coat, arms folded.

The defrost on that truck is loud. You have to talk over it. I shut the radio off somewhere by Benton City because the station was breaking up and I didn't feel like fooling with it.

Dale's a lineman for the PUD, twenty-some years. He's been up a pole in worse than that was, and he wasn't nervous, which helped, because I was. We talked about the roads. We talked about a guy at the fab shop in Prosser who went in the fall.

Then he got onto a storm he worked up at Ferndale a long time back and a fellow he was crewed with, and he took a while getting anywhere with it. I knew before he got there that he was going somewhere.

He asked me something. I'm not putting his words down. They're his.

I said yeah.

That's the conversation.

We got to Pasco at 9:40. Hampton wanted 189 and I'm not paying 189 for a bed a man is in for eight hours. Sleep Inn up on North Oregon, 112 plus tax, two rooms. Boys took one. Dale and I took the other, because that's how two rooms works and nobody sat down and discussed it.

We didn't say anything else for a good while. He had his arm up along the seat back and the truck was in park with the engine running. I texted Renee that we were in.

Two queens. I had the one by the window.

Nothing happened. I want that written exactly like that. Nothing happened. There was a college game on that neither of us had a dog in, and he was out before it ended, and at some point I got up and turned the heat down off 74 because whoever had the room before us left it there.

Weigh-ins at seven. Cody made 152 with a quarter pound on him, which has not happened before or since. Wyatt was three quarters over and had to go run the hallway in a sweatshirt. There was a waffle machine in the lobby and the boys weren't allowed near it until after.

Cody went 2 and 2. Lost the blood round to a kid out of Othello he'd stuck in December. Dale's boy took fourth and cried in the tunnel and Dale let him.

82 was bare and dry going home. Hour and twenty-five. We stopped in Prosser.

When he got out of my truck back at the school he put his hand on my shoulder. Guys do that.

That was two years ago in December and I've stood next to him at every meet since. He gets there early and holds the end of the second row because my knee's been no good since I came off a ladder in 19 and I can't do four hours of bleachers without something to hang onto. He was doing that before any of this.

Renee's sister does the scheduling at the clinic in Sunnyside and Dale's wife has been on that front desk eleven years. They do a thing at Christmas with the two families.

I don't know why this is the part anybody wants.

Cody's a senior now. He's up at 160. He and Wyatt still drill Tuesdays.