The Coach Who Cut a Grieving Boy

He held it out with the pencil clipped to it. Doug took it. Neither man said anything about it.

Then Kent turned to me. His face was gray and tired and his voice was very flat.

“Lori. I shouldn’t have put it in a text.”

“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t.”

“That’s all I’ve got this morning.”

“That’s all right.”

I didn’t say anything else. I had said all I was going to say on Thursday night, to ten men, on the phone, and none of it had been to him.

Kent went across the grass and up into the bleachers, to the far end, where a woman in a quilted vest was sitting alone with a toddler on her lap. His wife, I supposed. He sat down next to her. He took the whistle off over his head and put it in his jacket pocket, and he did not take it out again.

Doug turned the lineup card over in his hand. Then he walked to the end of the dugout and rubbed out a name with his thumb. He wrote in another.

“Luke’s been catching since Tuesday,” Wade said, low. “He’s all right at it. He’d rather play first.”

“Let him,” Doug said.

Luke Hoffer was ten, and he wore a body shop cap three sizes too big. When his father told him the news he looked over at the bleachers, where Eli was sitting with his mitt in his lap, and I watched him think about it with his whole face.

“Does he want it?” Luke said.

“He does.”

“Good. It smells in there.” He grabbed his first baseman’s glove out of the bag. “Tell him it smells.”

That got a laugh from the dugout. Not much of one. But it was the first sound I’d heard out of that place all morning that sounded like boys.

Eli put on the gray jersey, number 7, that I had run through the wash after he went to bed. It was a little damp at the collar. He pulled the chest protector on over it, and the shin guards, and he sat on the bench and did the straps himself without help from any of us, and I knelt in front of him on the dugout concrete to see that the left cleat was laced tight.

“Mom.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to do that in front of people.”

“All right,” I said, and I stood up and went and sat in the bleachers next to Ernest, and Ernest moved over to make room, and neither of us said a word.

The Rangers played the Grand Island Hawks, and I’ll tell you how it went, because I know people will ask.

They won, 6 to 4. Eli went one for three, a ground ball past the shortstop that he ran out hard. Doug ran the dugout without raising his voice a single time. At the other end of the stands, Kent Mallory sat beside his wife with his arms folded, and every time a ball was hit he leaned forward a little, and then remembered, and leaned back.

In the fifth, with a runner on first and one out, Hunter Mallory was pitching, and he threw a fastball that hit the dirt about six feet in front of the plate.