Sunday Dinner Behind the Dugout

By twelve-thirty I had fed both teams, a dozen parents, three little brothers, two grandpas and one umpire who swore he was off duty.

Lyle sat in his folding chair by the generator with a plate on his knee and watched me work.

I could tell he was proud, because he went back for a third barbecue and didn’t say a word about the onions.

About one o’clock, the mothers started coming over. Not all at once. One, then two, then a little cluster of them standing by the table with their paper plates, talking.

“I haven’t had a real lunch at a tournament since April,” one of them said. She was about Jenna’s age, with sunburned shoulders and a little one on her hip. “We eat in the car. I eat whatever the kids leave.”

“My husband grills in the parking lot sometimes,” said another. “But then he misses the game. One of us always misses something.”

A grandma from the other team, who had to be close to eighty, sat down on the end of the bleachers by my table and ate a lemon bar with her eyes closed.

When she opened them, she said, “This is what my mother used to bring to the threshing crews.”

“My grandmother too,” I said.

“Nobody does that anymore,” she said.

“Well,” I said. “Somebody does today.”

I looked up at the top row of the bleachers. Jenna was still there. Her laptop was still open.

But she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking down at my table, at the mothers laughing, at the old woman with her eyes closed.

I want to stop here and tell you something, because I know what some of you are thinking.

You’re thinking I should have marched up those bleachers and told Jenna what was what. You’re thinking she owed me thirty-four years of respect.

Maybe so. But I did not drive to Marshall to win. If I had wanted to win, I could have stayed home and called Nate every night that week until he made her apologize, and I would have won, and I would have lost my son a little.

I didn’t want to win. I wanted my grandkids fed. I wanted to sit next to them while they ate.

I wanted Carter to have the corner piece and Maddie to have a lemon bar, and I didn’t much care whether we did it at my table or a folding one.

The second game was set for two. The boys were back on the field warming up.

I was scraping the bottom of the second crockpot and the third was still half full, and I was thinking about how much I’d send home with the other team’s coach.

Jenna came down the bleacher steps with her laptop closed under her arm. She walked around the end of the bleachers, past the grandma from the other team, and she stopped at my table.

She looked at the crockpots. She looked at the corner piece hiding under the foil.

She looked at me, and her face was doing something I had never seen it do in eleven years of being my son’s wife.

“Bev,” she said.

I waited.

“Is there a chair?”

I didn’t trust myself to talk. I pointed at the second folding chair Lyle had brought, the one nobody had used all day.

Lyle, who had been sitting in the first one, got up without a word and walked over to lean on the fence and watch the infield.