The Shoebox Full of Box Scores

When the station did not carry the game, I called the school’s hotline after supper to get the score, and I wrote down what Lori told me when she got home, and I marked those with a little star so I would know they were secondhand.

I never told him. Not once in all those years. I would like to say I had some deep reason, but I did not. I thought the clippings were for me.

I thought what a boy needs is a dad in the bleachers, and I was not that, and a box of newspaper did not change it.

So I put the lid on it and I put it on a shelf, and then I moved it to the basement when we redid the closet, and somewhere along the way I forgot it was down there at all.

I had not thought about that shoebox in maybe six years when Travis raised his beer at me in the back room of the golf club and the whole room laughed.

We left the rehearsal dinner a little after nine. The groomsmen were going to the bar downtown. Travis hugged his mother at the door and then he hugged me, a quick one with two slaps on the back, the way men do.

“Love you, Dad,” he said. “See you at ten. Don’t be late for pictures.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Good toast, bud.”

He grinned. He did not think a thing of it. And why would he? I had spent fourteen years making sure there was nothing for him to think about.

It is forty minutes from the golf club to our place, most of it on a two-lane county road through beans that were just starting to turn. It was the third week of August. The air coming in the window smelled like dust and cut grass.

Lori did not turn the radio on. She always turns the radio on.

About halfway home, she said, “You’re going to tell him.”

“It’s his weekend,” I said.

“It’s yours too, Ron.”

“It was a joke. Everybody laughed. If I stand up and make a fuss about it, I’m the old man who couldn’t take a joke at his son’s wedding.”

“You don’t have to make a fuss,” she said. “You never made a fuss about any of it. That’s the whole problem.”

I drove for a mile without saying anything. A deer stood in the ditch with its head up and watched us go by.

“He’s going to have kids someday,” Lori said. “And he’s going to be in a field, or an office, or a hospital, or wherever he ends up, and he’s going to miss some things. And he’s going to think his dad never cared enough to come. And he’s going to think that’s what fathers do.”

I did not have an answer for that.

“I’m not saying you were there,” she said. “You weren’t. I’m saying he doesn’t know where you were. That’s a different thing.”

When we got home I sat in the truck in the yard with the engine off for a while.

Lori went in and turned the kitchen light on, and then she turned the basement light on and left the door open, and went up to bed without saying a word. That is her way of saying something.

The shoebox was on the metal shelf above the canning jars, behind a box of Christmas lights and an old crockpot we never used.