The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
“I know.”
“He’s not a bad man, Deb.”
“I know that too,” I said. “That’s what makes it hard.”
The third home Friday, early October, Coach Hoffman’s team had a bye week. We didn’t expect to see him.
At a quarter to six a dusty blue pickup came down the county road from the west and pulled up behind the flatbed. Coach Hoffman got out of the driver’s side. Tyler and three other boys climbed out of the back seat, and Tyler was grinning.
“Mrs. Schroeder,” he called. “I’m starting on kickoff now.”
“Then you’ll need three,” I said.
Coach Hoffman came around the front of the pickup with something under his arm. It was a gallon ice cream bucket, the plastic kind with a handle.
“Our booster club heard about you,” he said. “They’re small. But they wanted to send something. It’s not for the food.”
It was full of quarters and dollar bills and a few fives. Kids’ money, mostly. Some of it was from the boys themselves. Coach Hoffman said they’d passed the bucket around the locker room after practice, and the boys had voted to drive it over in person.
I had to hand it to Connie, because I couldn’t talk.
That night was the biggest crowd on Dale’s shoulder yet. Half the home bleachers came across at halftime. The Prairie Smoke truck had a line, too, and the young man running it came across the road himself during the third quarter and asked if we needed more buns, because he had extra.
“I didn’t know about any of this,” he said, looking at the grills. “When Mr. Kemp called, he said the old stand had sort of run its course. I wouldn’t have come out here and done this to you ladies.”
“You didn’t do anything to us, honey,” Lori said. “You’re feeding people. So are we.”
He gave us forty buns and wouldn’t take anything for them.
The week after that, a letter ran in our weekly paper.
It was on page four, the opinion page, between the county commissioner minutes and an ad for the elevator’s fall grain prices. The headline was just “A Thank You From Out West.” It was signed, Lyle Hoffman, Head Football Coach.
Jan cut it out and brought it to my kitchen. She read it out loud, the same way she’d read the numbers in the ag room, only this time she didn’t get her voice thin until the very end.
He wrote that he had coached for thirty-one years and had driven a lot of buses into a lot of towns. He wrote that he’d been welcomed politely in most and well in some.
He wrote that he had never once been met by six women and a farmer standing in a hayfield with two grills going, waiting for his boys like they were their own.
He wrote that one of his freshmen, who had not eaten since lunch and had given half of that away, had gone home and told his mother that the people in our town “fed us like we were somebody.”
He wrote that his school had not been able to pay for a supper stop in two years, and that nobody in his town had known how much it mattered until somebody else made up for it.
And at the end, he wrote this: “I understand your booster club recently retired these ladies from your concession stand. I hope you will forgive an outsider for saying so. I think you retired the wrong thing.”