The Memorial Fund My Niece Emptied

We are a small place. You can drive end to end in four minutes. There is the Co-op, the Methodist church, the Baptist church, the school, the Legion field, and a Casey’s out by the highway.

And Wes was not a famous man, but in a town like this, a man who coaches your sons for thirty-one years is about as close as we get.

Half the grown men in this county learned to turn a double play from my husband. He did it for nothing. He bought cleats for boys whose daddies could not, and he never once said whose.

So when word got around that there was a bench fund, this town opened its wallet.

I know that because people told me. For weeks, everywhere I went, somebody put a hand on my arm.

The man at the Co-op said he’d thrown in fifty. The ladies at church said the circle had gone in together. A fellow Wes coached in 1994, who drives a beer truck now, said he put in a hundred and cried doing it.

Darlene told me her whole bunco group had given. The high school athletic booster club gave. The Legion post gave.

I did not give online because I do not do much on the phone, so I wrote Shelby a check for a hundred dollars and put it in her hand myself at Sunday dinner.

She hugged me so hard it hurt a little.

By the end of September, I started hearing a number.

Somebody said the fund had passed five thousand. Then somebody said seven. A woman at the post office told me she heard it was over seven thousand dollars, and wasn’t that just the most this town had ever done for anybody.

Seven thousand dollars. For a two thousand dollar bench.

I remember thinking, that is wonderful, they can do the bench and give the rest to the youth league, buy the boys new uniforms, Wes would have liked that even better.

I was not suspicious. I want that on the record. I was proud.

October came.

The leaves on the maples out by the field went that deep orange they go, and the grass started to brown off, and the season was over, and there was no bench.

I noticed because I started going out there.

That is a thing nobody tells you about grief. You start driving to the places. I would take my coffee out to the Legion field in the morning and sit in the car and look at the empty diamond.

And every morning I looked at the spot behind home plate where the bench was going to be, and every morning it was just grass and a bare patch of dirt.

I told myself these things take time. Concrete has to cure. A brass plate has to be engraved. It was probably coming any day.

I did not want to be the pushy aunt.

But by the middle of October it had been almost two months, and the town had given seven thousand dollars, and there was not a bench, not a pad, not a stake in the ground.

So one Sunday after church I asked Shelby, light as I could make it, how the bench was coming along.

And I watched my niece’s face do a thing.