The Trophies Cutler Took Back From the Curb
“I got it. Thank you.”
I put my hands flat on the counter. “Tomorrow morning at nine, some men are going to come and carry those trophies back to your front window. Maybe a couple dozen.”
Her face changed. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. Lori, I can explain, the rep said…”
“I’m not here to argue.” I kept my voice low, because of the boy. “They’ll put the trophies up for the morning. And if you want them gone after that, they’ll go. It’s your store.”
“Are they going to yell?” she said, very quietly.
“No,” I said. “They’re going to read.”
She stared at me. Then she looked down the aisle at Mason, who had stopped sweeping and was watching us with the dustpan in his hand.
“What do they read?” he called.
“Names, honey,” I said. “Just names.”
At 8:40 Saturday morning, a pickup I didn’t recognize turned onto Main Street, and parked, and a man in a feed cap climbed out and stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.
Then another pickup.
Then a minivan, then two Buicks, then a flatbed with a hay hook still hanging off the headache rack. By five of nine a dozen trucks lined the curb and maybe twenty people stood on the sidewalk. A man in a gray Tigers jersey that no longer buttoned over his middle climbed out of an F-150, and I thought, that is Bart Egan, 1985.
I’d brought the trophies in my truck, and Lance lowered the tailgate. He’d driven back from Kearney at dawn, the nurse having promised to call if anything changed. Lance is not a man for a speech. He pulled the tarp off and stood there with his big hands hanging.
Marty Hollis came up the sidewalk with his wife at his elbow. He’s 47 now, thick through the middle, with the same squint he had at 12 on the mound. He put his hand into the first box and drew out a trophy, and I knew exactly which one it was.
He turned it so the plate caught the morning light.
“Cutler Tigers,” Marty read, and his voice carried the way a man’s voice does when he has called signals across a field. “1991. Most Valuable Player.” He swallowed. “Marty Hollis.”
He looked up the street, at the people. “That’s mine,” he said. “I want you all to know I didn’t deserve it. Bobby Dunham should’ve had it. But Mr. Tate put my name on it, so I’m taking it back to him.”
He turned and faced the store.
Shannon had unlocked the front door. She stood in the doorway in a clean blue shirt with Mason pressed against her side, and Kyle was behind them, looking like a man who had not slept. Neither of them said anything. They just stood there and let it happen, and I have thought about that every day since, because it took more nerve than anything I did.
Marty crossed the sidewalk. Slowly, in front of everyone, he set the trophy on the bottom oak shelf of the empty window, the one my father had built on a Saturday in 1984. It stood there alone in the morning sun, gold and a little tarnished.