The Trophies Cutler Took Back From the Curb
“I know it. I know that.” He glanced at the boxes. “But they’re just old trophies. It’s 40 years of dust.”
He said it gently. That was what I couldn’t get past. He said it like a man who believed he was doing me a kindness, clearing out a thing I was too sentimental to throw away myself.
I looked at that batter in my hand. I thought, he has never read one plate.
Not one.
I could have called the dealer’s district office. A man in a polo shirt in Omaha would have told me the window was the store’s window, and he would have been right, because the store was sold with everything in it and my father’s deal with the Little League board had never been written on anything but a handshake. I could have called the newspaper, and every person in town would have known Kyle Reiter’s name for the wrong reason, and the Reiters have a seven-year-old in the second grade who still eats lunch alone.
I could have called my husband.
I did, as it happens. Lance was in the vinyl chair beside Dad’s bed, where he had sat every day for eight days. He is 56, retired from the grain elevator, 6 foot 3, a man who in 33 years of marriage has never once raised his voice. I heard the chair creak.
“Want me to come down there?” he said. I could hear him already looking for his keys.
“No,” I said. “Stay with Dad. If you leave, he’ll ask where you went and he won’t be able to ask it right.”
Lance was quiet. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then I’ll sit,” he said, and I could hear that it cost him something, a good man made to sit still. “Call me if you need hands.”
But I could have made Kyle hand every one of those trophies to me that night. He’d have done it. And I would have driven them home and put them in my garage, and that would have been the end of them. A box in my garage is only another way of throwing a thing out. Nobody sees it. Nobody reads it.
Those trophies were never mine. They weren’t even my father’s, not really. They belonged to every boy whose name was on a plate, and I wanted those boys to be the ones who carried them home.
So I said, “Kyle, I’m going to take these tonight, before the rain.”
“Sure.” He seemed almost relieved. “Absolutely. Take whatever you want.”
“Please don’t set out anything else.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t.”
He helped me lift the last box. The bottom had gone soft from a wet spot on the curb, and a trophy slid out, a tiny batter with its arms up, and the bat broke off at the wrist and skittered across the sidewalk. Kyle picked up the bat and turned it over in his big fingers, as if he had just noticed it had weight.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know you are.”
I tied the tarp down over the bed of the truck myself. By the time I turned onto the county road, the rain had started in earnest.