The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
Their coach climbed down first. He was a gray-haired man in a blue windbreaker, sixty or so, with reading glasses hanging on a cord around his neck. He had the face of a man who has driven a lot of buses to a lot of towns.
“Lyle Hoffman,” he said, and shook Gary’s hand, then mine.
A skinny boy stood on the bottom step behind him. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. He was folding an empty brown lunch sack into a smaller and smaller square, the way kids do when they don’t know what to do with their hands.
Coach Hoffman looked at the grills. He looked at the coffee can. He looked at the six of us.
“Ladies,” he said, “I’ve got thirty-one boys and eleven dollars. What do we owe you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s free. All of it. As much as they want.”
He didn’t say anything for a second. He took off his cap and put it back on.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I don’t understand.”
So I told him. Not all of it. I told him that we’d run the stand across the road for a long time and now we didn’t, and that we’d watched his boys and boys like them stand at the fence for twenty-two years with nothing in their pockets. And that we had the grills and the meat and the time.
“Our school used to pay for a supper stop,” he said. “Two years ago they cut it. Some of the parents send something. Some can’t.” He looked back at the bus. “Most of these boys ate lunch at eleven-fifteen.”
“Then they’re hungry,” Connie said. “Send them out.”
He turned around and said something into the bus, and thirty-one boys came down those steps like water out of a tank.
We fed them. Two burgers each, more if they asked, and most of them asked. Milk, cinnamon rolls, a bag of chips. Gary flipped burgers on one grill and Barb on the other, and Jan wrapped them in foil, and Lori handed them out with a word for every boy.
They said “thank you, ma’am” every time. Every single boy. Somebody had raised them right, or their coach had, or both.
The skinny boy was the last one off the bus. He hung back until the line was almost gone. Then he came up to the table and looked at me, and he looked at the burger, and he didn’t take it.
“Is it really free?” he said.
“It’s really free,” I said. “What’s your name, honey?”
“Tyler,” he said. “I’m a freshman. I don’t play much. I’m mostly on special teams.”
“Special teams have to eat too,” I said, and I put a burger in his hand.
He ate it standing right there by the tailgate. He ate it in about six bites, and when he finished he folded the foil into a square, just like the lunch sack. I put another one in his hand without asking.
“When did you eat last, Tyler?” I said.
“Lunch,” he said. “I gave half my sandwich to my buddy. He forgot his.”
I had to turn around and look at the grain elevator for a minute. Gary saw it. He didn’t say anything. He just put another patty on the grill.
When the bus pulled across the road and into the visitors’ lot, Coach Hoffman stood on the bottom step and called out to us.
“We’re going to lose tonight,” he said, smiling for the first time. “But we’re going to lose full.”