Sunday Dinner Behind the Dugout

“You’re not,” Jenna said.

“I was getting close,” I said. “Kim told me so on Monday.”

That made her laugh for real. Everyone in the family knows Kim.

The umpire called the start of the second game. Carter’s team was home, so they took the field first, and I watched Nate jog out to coach third base and look back over his shoulder at the two of us sitting together behind the dugout.

He stopped for a second in the baseline. Then he lifted his cap off his head and put it back on, which is the same thing his father does when he can’t think of anything to say, and he went to his spot.

Jenna ate the rest of her barbecue. She ate the lemon bar. Then she reached under the foil and found the corner piece of the scotcheroos and looked at me with a question in her eyes.

“That’s Carter’s,” I said. “He asked.”

She smiled and put it back. “He asked you to save it?”

“He wanted to know if it still counted out here.”

She was quiet for a minute, looking at the field. Carter was playing shortstop, crouched low, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“I think that’s what I got wrong,” she said. “I thought the table was the point. Like the point was sitting in the dining room for two hours. I didn’t realize the point was just you.”

“The point was always the kids,” I said. “The table was just where I kept them.”

We sat together for the whole second game. Jenna did not open her laptop once. She yelled when Carter threw a boy out at first from deep in the hole.

She stood up and screamed when Maddie, who had wandered down to the fence, got a foul ball tossed to her by the third base coach on the other team.

In the fifth inning, the mothers came back over, two or three at a time, and stood around my table, and Jenna started talking to them.

I found out more about those women in two hours than Jenna had learned in two summers of walking past them on her way to the car.

“How do you do it?” one of them asked Jenna, about work.

“I don’t,” Jenna said. “I just pretend.”

And all the women laughed, because every one of them was pretending too. I stood there over my crockpots and I thought, my goodness, this is just a Sunday dinner table with no table.

Carter’s team lost the championship game four to three in the bottom of the sixth. The boys were heartbroken for about ten minutes.

Then Carter came running behind the dugout, sweaty and still sniffing, and stopped in front of me.

“Grandma,” he said. “Did you save it?”

I lifted the foil. He picked up the corner piece and ate it in two bites, and then he hugged me, in front of everybody, his friends and his coach and the other team.

He’d forgotten about being too old for it. I didn’t remind him.

We packed up around four. Lyle carried the crockpots out to the truck, wrapped in their towels, and loaded the generator in the bed.

I folded up the table, and Jenna picked up the other end without being asked and helped me carry it.

At the truck, she stopped. She was holding the empty bar pans against her chest.