Sunday Dinner Behind the Dugout

“Bev,” she said. “Would you do this again?”

“Do what?”

“This. At the tournaments. I know it’s a lot to ask. I know it’s not your kitchen, and it’s hot, and it’s forty minutes away, and some weekends it’ll be two hours to Sioux Falls.”

“Jenna,” I said.

“I’ll pay for the groceries,” she said, fast, like she’d been rehearsing it. “I’ll help cook on Saturday nights if you show me how. I’m terrible, but I’ll help. I just…”

She looked over at the field, where the next two teams were warming up.

“I just liked sitting down,” she said. “I liked sitting down with you.”

I took the bar pans out of her hands and set them in the truck, and then I hugged my son’s wife in the parking lot of a ball complex in Marshall, Minnesota.

It was the first real hug we’d had in eleven years. Not a church hug. A real one.

“I’ll be there every tournament,” I said. “And you’re not paying for groceries. You’re bringing the rotisserie chickens.”

She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the tailgate.

The next tournament was in Pipestone, Maddie’s softball. I brought three crockpots of chicken and wild rice hotdish and a pan of Special K bars.

Jenna met me at the truck at nine in the morning and carried the generator by herself, which Lyle still talks about.

The coach from the team near Worthington, the big man in the feed cap, was there with his daughter’s softball team.

He walked over to my table with a slow cooker full of baked beans, set it down next to mine, and said, “I told you I’d bring something.”

The weekend after that, in Worthington, three more families brought dishes. A pan of scalloped potatoes. A cooler of watermelon cut into triangles.

By the middle of July, it wasn’t my table anymore. It was everybody’s. There were two folding tables, then three.

People started texting each other on Fridays about who was bringing what.

The grandma who ate the lemon bar with her eyes closed brought rhubarb crisp in a nine-by-thirteen cake pan every single weekend.

She told me her name was Arlene, and she told me she had not cooked for a crowd since her husband’s funeral lunch in 2019.

“I forgot how much I liked it,” she said.

“Me too,” I said, even though I had never stopped. I knew what she meant.

Nate came by my house one Wednesday night in July, alone, which he does not usually do. He sat at the kitchen table, the real one, and I made him a cup of coffee he didn’t drink.

“Mom,” he said. “I should have said something. That Sunday. At the sink.”

“Said what?”

“I don’t know. Something. I just stood there. I’ve been standing there between you two for eleven years, and I just kept thinking if I didn’t pick a side, nobody would get hurt.”

“You didn’t need to pick a side,” I said. “There weren’t two sides. There were two tired women and a pot roast.”

He laughed, but his eyes were wet.

“She’s different at the games now,” he said. “She sits. She talks to people. Last week she brought her own hotdish. It was terrible, Mom. It was the worst hotdish I’ve ever had. Nobody said a word, and everybody took seconds.”

“That’s what you do,” I said. “That’s what a table is for.”