The Coach Who Cut a Grieving Boy

I put the phone face down.

Eli went to bed at nine. I did what I always did, sat on the edge of his mattress and waited for his breathing to change. It took longer than usual.

Before it did, he spoke into the dark.

“Dad said I was his catcher.”

“I know he did, honey.”

I did not know. I had been in the concession stand at Kearney, counting change for the booster club, and I had heard the whole tournament through a window with a pop machine humming in it. But a mother learns what to say in a dark room.

“He said it at the game,” Eli said. “Out loud. To Mr. Reiter. I wasn’t supposed to hear.”

“What did he say exactly?”

“Just that. ‘That’s my catcher.'” A pause. “Does it still count?”

I said it counted more than anything. I said it twice, so he could take one of them to sleep.

He was breathing slow by then. I sat there awhile longer anyway, and then I went down to the kitchen, and I took the team sheet off the refrigerator.

I had stuck it up there in August with a magnet shaped like the state of Nebraska. It was a photocopy from the sign-up night, with the boys’ names down the left side and a phone number for a parent beside each one. Doug Reiter, Wade Hoffer, Curtis Ostrom, a dozen others. I had never called a single one of those numbers except to ask who was bringing the orange slices.

What I decided was this. I would not ask anybody for anything. I would not say a bad word about Kent Mallory. I would read the text out loud, word for word, to each father, one at a time, and then I would tell him what Eli had asked me at the sink. That was all.

I would give each of them the chance to be the man he probably already was.

I started with Doug Reiter, because Ron had played catch with Doug’s boy Owen in the yard behind our place every Sunday afternoon of the spring.

Doug picked up on the first ring.

“Doug, it’s Lori. I’m not calling to ask you for anything.”

“Lori.” I could hear a television in the background, and then I couldn’t. He had walked into another room. “Is it Eli? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him. I want you to hear what the text said. Not what you remember it saying.”

I read it to him slowly. Every word. I read “dragging the boys down” the same way I read the rest.

He didn’t answer. I could hear him breathing.

Then he said, “I got that text. I read it. And I put my phone face down on the counter.”

“I know.”

“That boy was at my table in August. He ate three pork chops.”

“He did.”

“I’m ashamed of that,” Doug said. “I put the phone down because I didn’t know what to say, and I figured somebody else would say it.”

“Somebody usually does,” I said. “Doug, I’m not asking for anything. I wanted you to know what Eli asked me tonight.”