The Shoebox Full of Box Scores

I sat on that step until a little after two in the morning. I read every one of them. Some of them twice. When I went upstairs, Lori was awake in the dark.

“Well?” she said.

“I’m going to need you to find me a new lid,” I said.

I got maybe three hours of sleep. At six I was up anyway, because that is when I am up, and I went out and walked the yard in the gray light with a cup of coffee and the shoebox under my arm, like a man carrying a casserole to a funeral.

The plan was a brunch at ten in the same back room at the golf club, for the wedding party and the families, before the photographer took everybody out on the course for pictures. The ceremony was at two at the Lutheran church in town.

Lori came out on the step in her robe. “Did you decide?”

“I’m going to ask Jenna,” I said. “It’s her day. If she says no, it stays in the truck, and that’s the end of it.”

“That’s fair,” Lori said. Then she said, “Wear the blue tie.”

We got to the golf club at a quarter to ten. Jenna was already there in a white sweater with her hair pinned up, going over the seating chart with her mother.

I waited until her mother went to see about the coffee, and then I walked over with the box.

I am not good at this kind of thing. I had practiced it in the truck, and none of it came out the way I practiced.

“Jenna,” I said, “I need to ask you something, and you can say no. Last night Travis said I never came to his games. He’s right. I didn’t. But there’s something he doesn’t know, and I’d like to tell him in front of the people who heard that, if it’s all right with you. It’d take five minutes. And if you’d rather I didn’t, I’ll understand.”

She looked at me, and then she looked at the box. The lid said “Ron, keep.”

“What’s in it?” she said.

“Box scores,” I said. “Every game he played. With what the radio said, in the margins. I listened from the tractor.”

She did not say anything for a second. Then she put her hand flat on top of the lid.

“Please,” she said. “Please do it. Before the food comes out, so people are listening.”

I thanked her. She squeezed my arm. As I walked away I heard her say to her mother, very quietly, “Mom, sit down, Ron’s going to say something.”

People came in. Travis came in last with the groomsmen, a little gray around the edges from the night before, in a white shirt and a tie he had not finished tying. He saw me and gave me a thumbs-up. I gave him one back.

The golf club had left the microphone up from the night before, on a stand by the head table. When everybody had coffee, Jenna caught my eye and nodded.

I stood up. I walked to the microphone. My hands were shaking, and it was not the shakes I get from Dad’s side. I set the shoebox on the corner of the head table and took the lid off.

The room got quiet. Somebody at a back table said, “Uh oh, Ron’s got a speech,” and a few people laughed, kindly.