The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
They did lose. Thirty-five to fourteen. But Tyler made a tackle on a kickoff in the third quarter, and I saw it, because by the third quarter I was standing at the fence with the others.
Because something had happened at halftime.
At halftime, a few people from our side wandered across the road.
It started with the Kriegers, who farm north of us. Pete Krieger walked across with his granddaughter on his shoulders. He looked at the grills and the empty patty boxes and the cooler, and he said, “Deb, what in the world are you doing out here?”
So I told him. I didn’t make it sound like anything. I just told him we were feeding the visiting team because their bus came a long way and they didn’t have supper money.
Pete looked at me for a long time. Then he took out his wallet and put a twenty in Connie’s coffee can.
“That’s not for the food,” I said. “The food’s free.”
“I know it,” Pete said. “That’s for whatever you’ll use it for.”
“The scholarship,” Connie said. She hadn’t planned it. It just came out of her. “The Stand Moms Scholarship. And the band.”
“Good,” Pete said. “Then that’s what it’s for.”
By the end of halftime, there were maybe forty people on Dale’s shoulder. Somebody’s teenager went home and came back with a bag of hot dogs. A man I barely knew brought a third grill out of his pickup.
The coffee can had $212 in it at the end of the night. Connie counted it on my kitchen table at eleven o’clock while Gary washed the grates in the sink.
“That’s more than that truck pays per game,” Jan said, doing the math on her legal pad. “Three thousand over five home games is six hundred a game. We’re not there yet.”
“We’re not trying to be there,” I said. “We’re feeding a bus.”
“I know,” Jan said. “I’m just writing it down.”
The next home game, the visitors were bigger and richer than we were and had stopped for supper in Grand Island. Their bus pulled in full and happy, and their coach waved at us out the window.
So we fed whoever came. A couple of their parents, who’d driven separately. Their bus driver. The chain crew, two retired men who have run the sticks for thirty years.
And at halftime, our people came across again. More of them. They didn’t need to be told. They just came.
A woman from the Methodist church brought three pies. The FFA kids brought folding chairs.
The can had $640 in it that night.
By then people were talking. In a town of 1,400, people are always talking, but now they were talking about this. At the café on Saturday mornings. At the co-op. At church.
At church, Pastor Mike didn’t mention it in the sermon. But in the announcements he said there would be a casserole sign-up in the back for “the across-the-road ministry,” and the sheet was full before the last hymn.
I thought about Travis Kemp a lot those weeks.
He came to the games. Of course he came, his boy was a sophomore lineman. He stood inside the fence by the food truck and he looked across the road at us, and he didn’t come over.
I didn’t go to him either. Not because I was proud. I’ll be honest, a little of it was pride. But mostly it was because I didn’t know what I’d say that wouldn’t come out wrong.
“You could just go talk to him,” Gary said one night, driving home.