The Coach Who Cut a Grieving Boy

“He missed two practices,” Doug said. “One was the day before the funeral. One was the day after.”

“I sent my condolences.”

“You sent a text, Kent.”

Wade Hoffer had come up behind us with the lime bucket, and he set it down on the concrete very carefully, the way you do when you don’t trust your hands.

“I put a thumbs-up on that text,” he said. “Thursday night. I’ve been sick about it since. And I said something to you in August about moving Luke to the Kearney club if we lost another one. That’s on me too. But I did not mean cut a boy whose daddy’s in the ground. I didn’t think I had to say that.”

“It’s not personal,” Kent said. He said it to the lineup card. “I took this team in January. They’d been losing two years. Every one of you wants a banner and nobody wants to say what it costs.”

“What did it cost?” said a voice behind me. “Last Thursday night, I mean. Humor me.”

It was Tina Eide. She had come across from the concession stand in her green league jacket, a gray-haired woman of about sixty with a lanyard around her neck and a manila folder in her hand. She ran the Mid-Platte league out of her kitchen table and a post office box, and she had been running it for twenty-three years. I knew her from sign-up night in August. She was the one who gave out the orange slices.

“Tina,” Kent said. “This isn’t…”

“I had four phone calls last night between ten and midnight,” Tina said, mildly. “Marcy Reiter. Two other mothers. One father. Not one of them wanted to complain about a loss.” She opened the folder. Inside, in a plastic sleeve, was the same sign-up sheet I had in my kitchen drawer. “I wrote this at my table in the year two thousand and three. Section four. Removal.”

“I know what it says.”

“Then you’ll know it better when I read it.” She held it at arm’s length, because her glasses were on her head. “A player may be removed for attendance only after two written warnings to the family. An absence for a death in the immediate family is excused. Fees are refunded in full when the removal is not the player’s choice.” She looked at him over the page. “I put that third sentence in because a coach in Wood River cut a girl who spent the season of her mother’s chemo at a hospital in Omaha. I was not going to have that in my league, and I put it in writing so I would not have to say it out loud.”

“I didn’t read that part,” Kent said.

“No. You read the part that said nonrefundable.” She closed the folder. “That’s a different section. It’s for the family that quits.”

Nobody said anything. Down the third-base line, one of the boys laughed at something, and a ball smacked into a glove.

Kent Mallory looked at the card in his hand. I had never seen anybody study a piece of cardboard so hard. He was not crying. He didn’t look angry, either. He looked like a man who has been handed his own bill.

“Doug,” he said, after a long time. “Take the card.”