The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
That was the line people repeated. At the café, at the co-op, at church. “You retired the wrong thing.”
Jan folded the clipping and set it next to the plaque, which was still leaning on my kitchen windowsill, because I hadn’t figured out where to put it.
“Well,” Jan said. “There it is.”
Travis Kemp called me that Saturday.
I almost didn’t pick up. Gary was in the shop, and I stood in the kitchen and watched the phone ring three times before I answered.
“Deb,” Travis said. “It’s Travis. Could I come by?”
He came by at two. He sat at my kitchen table where Jan had read the letter and Connie had counted the can. He had his cap in his hands the way Gary holds his at meetings. He looked at the plaque on the windowsill and then he didn’t look at it again.
“I owe you an explanation,” he said. “I should have given it at the meeting, and I didn’t.”
“All right,” I said. I poured him coffee.
“The school board came to me in June,” he said. “The scoreboard’s thirty years old. Half the lights are out and they can’t get parts. A new one is about forty thousand dollars. They told me the boosters had to raise it in two years, or it wouldn’t happen.”
He turned the cup around on the table.
“I sell insurance,” he said. “I look at numbers all day. And I looked at the stand, and I saw six ladies in their sixties and seventies working every Friday night, and I thought, what happens when one of them gets sick? What happens when two of them can’t do it? Then we have nothing. The truck was a sure three thousand. Every year. In my head that was safer.”
“You could have asked us,” I said.
“I know.”
“We’d have told you we had a plan for that. Connie’s granddaughter has been helping since she was twelve. Patty’s daughter-in-law. Barb’s niece. We’ve been bringing them up for years.”
He closed his eyes. “I didn’t know that.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t. Because you didn’t ask.”
I didn’t say it to be hard. I said it because it was true, and because I thought he needed to hear it from me, at my table, more than he needed to read it in the paper.
He sat there a long time.
“I read the coach’s letter four times,” he said. “And then I went out to the scoreboard last night after everybody left. And I stood there and I thought, I’ve been trying to buy this town a new sign that says HOME on it. And you six have been showing everybody what it means.”
“I’m going to make a motion at the next board meeting,” he said. “To give the stand back. I’ll make it myself. Kyle, the young man with the truck, already told me he’d rather do the fair circuit anyway. He says he felt bad all season.”
“He brought us buns,” I said.
“I heard.”
He stood up and put his cap on. He stopped at the door.
“Deb, the last home game is in two weeks,” he said. “Would it be all right if I came across the road?”
“It’s Dale’s road,” I said. “Anybody can come.”
“I meant to help.”
I looked at him. He’s forty-one. He’s younger than my oldest boy. He coaches Little League and he made a mistake in front of the whole town and now the whole town knew it.