The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
“Bring an apron,” I said. “Barb runs the second grill. She’ll tell you what to do.”
The last home game of the season was the third Friday in October. It was cold. It was the kind of cold where you can see your breath by six and the stadium lights make everything look like a photograph.
We set up the same as always. Gary loaded the flatbed at four. He strapped the kettles to the headache rack and brought the barrel grill too, the old one that leaks, because we were going to need it.
The visitors that night were a team from the east, an hour away, with a bus that had stopped for supper. We fed their parents and their bus driver and anybody else who came.
Travis showed up at a quarter to six.
He walked across the road from the school side, in front of everybody in the gate line. He was wearing a white apron that said Kiss the Cook, which his wife had bought him as a joke one Christmas, and he did not take it off.
Barb looked him up and down. Then she handed him a spatula.
“You press down on a burger,” she said, “I’ll send you back across.”
“Yes ma’am,” Travis said.
He didn’t press down on a single burger. He flipped them the way Barb showed him, once, and he served them with a “thank you for coming” to every person in line. When people looked at him funny, and a lot of them did, he just nodded and kept flipping.
At halftime most of our side came across. They came across the road the way they’d been doing for weeks, kids and grandparents and the band in their uniforms, the ones our stand had paid for.
The band director brought the drum line out to the shoulder and they played the fight song on Dale’s hayfield. Travis stood at the grill in his apron with his face red from the coals and sang along.
That night the can went over. Jan counted it at my kitchen table at midnight, and then counted it again, because she didn’t believe herself.
For the whole season, between the coffee can and Coach Hoffman’s ice cream bucket and the checks people mailed to my house with notes in them, we had $4,318.
“That’s more than the truck paid,” Jan said. “Thirteen hundred more.”
“And we gave the food away,” said Patty.
“And we gave the food away,” Jan said, and wrote it down.
The booster board met the first Tuesday in November, back in the ag room with the welding booths dark behind the table.
It was standing room only. I had never seen that. People stood along the walls and in the doorway, and some of them had never been to a booster meeting in their lives.
Travis stood up at the front, the same place he’d stood in September.
“I’d like to make a motion,” he said. “That the concession stand go back to the six women who ran it for twenty-two years, starting next season, for as long as they want it.”
He paused.
“And I’d like to say, in front of everybody, that I was wrong. I didn’t ask the people who knew. I’m sorry for that. To all six of you.”
He looked right at us when he said it. He didn’t look at the floor this time.
Gary seconded the motion. It passed seven to nothing.
Then Jan stood up, with her legal pad, and said there was one more thing.