The Shoebox Full of Box Scores

“I’ll be quick,” I said. “I’m not a speech man. Last night my son thanked his mother for coming to every game he ever played, and she did, and she deserves every bit of that. And he said I never came to one, because I was always in the field.”

I looked at Travis. He had a little smile on, waiting for the joke.

“Travis’s right,” I said. “I never sat in those bleachers. Not one game.”

Somebody chuckled, then stopped, because I did not.

“But I’d like to read you something,” I said.

I took the first clipping off the top of the sophomore stack. My reading glasses were in my shirt pocket, and it took me two tries to get them on.

“This is from April 2014,” I said. “His sophomore year. Albrecht, second base, three at-bats, one hit.” I turned it a little toward the light.

“And in the margin, in my pencil, it says, line drive to right. Radio says the kid has quick hands. Planting the Johnson eighty. Good job, bud.”

I looked up. Nobody was eating. Nobody was even holding a fork.

I read the oh for four against New London, and the ump with the wide zone, and the rainout. A couple people laughed at that one, and it helped.

I read the diving stop up the middle. I read the walk-off in his junior year, and the part about pulling over on the township road and sitting there ten minutes with my cap off.

I read one of the starred ones, and I explained the stars. “That means I didn’t hear it,” I said. “That means his mother told me at supper. She told me every one. She was my radio when the radio wasn’t on.”

Lori was sitting very still at our table with her hands folded on something in her lap, wrapped in one of her flour-sack dish towels. I did not know what it was. I did not ask. I kept going.

Somewhere around the sixth or seventh clipping, Travis put his hand over his eyes.

Jenna laid her hand flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, and left it there.

“There’s 63 of these,” I said. “Every game he played for three years, the county paper ran a box. And every one of them has something in the margin. I won’t read them all. Your eggs will get cold.”

That got a laugh. A small one. I was glad of it.

“I’m not up here to argue with my son,” I said. “He didn’t say anything wrong. He said what he saw. What he saw was a set of empty bleachers, and that’s on me. I just didn’t want him to start his marriage thinking his dad didn’t care where he was. I always knew where he was. I just wasn’t there.”

I picked up the senior stack. I went through it until I got to the bottom, to the state game, and I took that one out and held it.

And then I stopped.

Because of what I had written in that margin. I had never meant for anybody to read it. Not Lori, not Travis, not anybody. I had written it for myself, at the kitchen table, on a Wednesday in June after everybody else had gone to bed.

I stood there with my mouth open and nothing coming out of it.

Travis pushed his chair back.