The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
“Who decided this,” I asked, “and when?”
“The board,” he said. “Last Thursday. We have seven members. You can read the minutes.”
“Can we vote on it again?”
He looked at the other board members. “If somebody wants to move to reconsider, sure. That’s the rules.”
Jan stood up. Jan is the one of us who keeps the books, and she had come prepared, because Jan always comes prepared. She had a yellow legal pad with twenty-two years of numbers on it in blue ink.
She read them out loud. The year we cleared $6,400. The year we cleared $11,200 because we made the playoffs and had two extra home games. The four years of band uniforms. The names of all sixteen kids who had gotten the scholarship.
When she got to the names, her voice went thin. One of those kids is a nurse in Kearney now. One runs the welding shop out by the highway. Jan read every name the same and kept going.
Then my husband stood up.
Gary is a farmer. He runs cattle and grows corn and beans on ground his grandfather broke, and in thirty years of marriage I had never once heard him speak at a public meeting. He sits in the back with his cap on his knee and he listens.
He was on the booster board because nobody else would take the seat when old Mr. Ritter passed. He went to the meetings and mostly nodded. He had missed the Thursday meeting because he was helping a neighbor pull a calf.
“I wasn’t here for the vote,” Gary said. “So I’ll say it now. You’re trading nine thousand for three. That’s not a business decision, Travis. That’s a bad one.”
Travis started to answer. Gary held up his hand, not rude, just finished.
“And those women aren’t volunteers you chase,” he said. “They’re the reason half the people in those bleachers come early. That’s all I’ve got.” He sat down.
The board voted again. Gary and Jan’s husband, Ron, voted to keep the stand with us. The other five voted for the truck.
Five to two.
Travis looked sorry about it. I’ll give him that. But he didn’t change his mind, and he slid the plaque a little closer to us on the table, like that settled it.
Barb cried in the parking lot. She cried with her hand over her mouth so the people walking to their cars wouldn’t see, and Patty stood in front of her like a fence.
“Twenty-two years,” Barb kept saying. “He gave us a board with our names on it like we died.”
Lori was furious. Lori had been a hairdresser for thirty years and has never once in her life swallowed a thing she wanted to say.
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll set up across the road and sell burgers for two dollars. We’ll put that truck out of business by October.”
“No,” I said.
Everybody looked at me. I was holding the plaque, because somebody had to carry it out to the car.
“We’re not going to sell against our own school,” I said. “Whatever that truck pays, it pays the boosters. The boosters pay for the band. If we cut the truck’s legs out, we’re cutting the band’s.”
Gary was standing by the truck with the door open, waiting. He didn’t say anything. He doesn’t, when it’s mine to say.
“Then what,” Patty said. “We just go sit in the bleachers like company?”