The Coach Who Cut a Grieving Boy

That was Monday. By Thursday night he had cut my son.

I called Kent’s number exactly once.

It rang four times and went to voicemail, and I did not leave a message, because I did not trust what I would say. Four minutes later my phone buzzed again.

“Decision’s made. Eli can try out again next season if he’s ready. Please don’t make this ugly in front of the boys.”

I read that one standing in the kitchen too, with the dish towel back in my hand.

Here is what I knew about Kent Mallory. The Rangers had dropped a tournament in Kearney the weekend before Ron died, 11 to 2, and Eli had gone hitless in three games. That was true. It was also true that he had missed two practices that week, the Tuesday after his father died and the Thursday after we buried him, and that was the whole case.

Kent was 38. He ran the parts counter at the implement dealer, two doors down from where Ron worked, and he had played shortstop for Ames Creek High about twenty years ago. His son Hunter was on the team, a good-natured kid who threw hard and wild. Kent had taken over the Rangers in January when the old coach moved to Lincoln, and he ran his practices tight and loud, with a whistle on a lanyard and a clipboard under his arm.

I stood at that sink and I wanted to do the loud thing.

I wanted to drive to the ball complex at the fairgrounds the next morning, stand at the third-base end of the bleachers where I had sat for two seasons next to Ron, and say every word I was thinking in front of every boy and father on that team.

Then I looked at my son in his father’s chair, and I saw how it would go. Eli would be the boy whose mother did that. He would carry it into middle school. He would be the kid whose mother screamed at the coach the week his dad died, and every boy on that field would remember how it went and not one of them would remember why.

Ron would have been at that man’s door in ten minutes, still in his work boots, and he would not have raised his voice either. Ron did not have to. He just stood there until the other man heard himself.

But Ron was in the Ames Creek cemetery under a mound of dirt that hadn’t settled yet.

I did not have the league, either, not in time. The Mid-Platte Youth Baseball board met on the third Monday of every month in a back room at the Legion hall, and the next meeting was eleven days off. Regionals opened Saturday. By the time any board looked at this, Eli would have watched his team play a whole weekend from the wrong side of a chain-link fence.

I had also paid $1,115 in August. Eight hundred and fifty for the fall season, $140 for the uniform and bag, and $125 for the regional entry. I wrote it in two checks out of the account we kept for the kids’ things, and Ron wrote on the memo line of the second one, “for the kid’s cleats and dreams,” because Ron thought that was funny.