“Do you have a dog?”
“No.”
“Can you braid hair?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you like the Minnesota Twins?”
“Only when they’re winning.”
She laughed.
That summer, Travis secretly taught himself to braid hair using a length of orange baler twine tied to a cabinet handle in his warehouse.
I discovered him practicing one afternoon.
He blushed when he realized I was watching.
We married the following year.
Kaylee was eight.
She called him Travis then, and she still called him Travis at seventeen.
Neither of them ever made an issue of it.
I assumed that was simply how their relationship worked.
But Travis did everything a devoted father would do.
He drove Kaylee to volleyball practice, sometimes making a two-hour round trip. He built a practice net from old fence posts and cargo netting. He attended every match and kept detailed statistics on a clipboard nobody had asked him to bring.
He knew her performance numbers almost as well as her coach.
