The Coach Who Cut a Grieving Boy

“Never too late for Ron’s wife.” He cleared his throat. “I sat in the back of the church so I wouldn’t be in the way.”

“I saw you. I wanted to thank you.”

“No need.”

I read him the text. The line went so quiet I could hear a clock somewhere in his kitchen.

“Well,” Ernest said at last, slow and dry. “I raised one boy and I’m raising another, ma’am, and I never once cut either of them off a team for something that happened to them.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything, Ernest.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “That’s what makes it hard to sit still.”

I called all ten before midnight. A couple of calls were as short as Doug’s. One man, Curtis Ostrom, was cold with me and said he would have to think about it, which I understood, because Curtis’s wife was Kent’s cousin. Two didn’t answer, and I left a short message on each of those phones that said only, “This is Lori Sandvig. Please call me when you can. Nothing is wrong.”

I never said a bad word about Kent Mallory. I never asked a single man to do a single thing.

At 12:20 I turned off the kitchen light and went up to bed and did not sleep.

Friday was long.

Eli went to school. I let him. I heard nothing from anyone all morning, and by noon I felt foolish. I stood at the window after the bus pulled away and I thought, I have done something, and I don’t know if it was the right thing, and it’s too late to take it back.

At two o’clock, Kent texted me directly. Not the group.

“Hearing a lot of chatter. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

I looked at it a long while. I thought of a dozen answers. I typed none of them. I put the phone in my apron pocket and peeled potatoes for supper.

At seven that evening, a pickup I didn’t recognize came up our lane. It was an old Ford with a rust bubble over the wheel well, and Ernest Nance got out of it, slow, with his feed-store cap on, carrying a loaf of banana bread wrapped in a dish towel.

He came up on the porch and handed it to me without a word.

“Ernest, you didn’t have to.”

“My wife made this recipe for forty-two years,” he said. “I thought you could use something that wasn’t a casserole.”

I laughed. It came out of me like a hiccup. I hadn’t laughed since Sunday.

“Doug Reiter’ll be in touch,” Ernest said. “I don’t know any more than that.”

He turned to go. Halfway down the steps he said, without looking back, “You’ll want the boy’s mitt.”

I stood there with the bread still warm in my hands.

That night Eli and I ate the first slice at the counter. I asked him a thing I had been working up to all day, and I asked it carefully, because it was his and not mine.

“If Doug says come to the field tomorrow, and Coach Kent is there, do you want to go?”

He didn’t answer right away. He ate the heel of the bread and thought, with his mouth pulled to one side the way Ron’s used to go.