The Shoebox Full of Box Scores

He came around the end of the head table, slow, like a man walking up to a horse he did not want to spook. He stood next to me at the microphone. His eyes were red.

He held out his hand for the box.

I gave it to him. I did not know what else to do. I kept the state clipping in my hand, and he did not ask for it, not yet.

He looked down into the box for a long time. He touched the rusted paper clips. Then he looked at me, and he said, quietly, not into the microphone, “Can I have this, Dad? Can I keep it?”

“It’s yours,” I said. “It was always yours. I just never gave it to you.”

He nodded. He leaned into the microphone, and his voice came out rough.

“I want to read one,” he said. “If that’s all right. I know which one I want.”

He went through the senior stack with his thumb, fast, like a man who already knew the order. I do not know how he knew it. Maybe he did not. Maybe he just knew the date. He pulled one out about halfway down.

“Paynesville,” he said. “May of my senior year. I hit three triples that night. Three. Coach told me nobody had done that at our field since the eighties.” He laughed a little, wet. “I always thought nobody saw it but Mom and Grandma and about forty people.”

He held the clipping up to his face. Jenna stood up and came around beside him, and he leaned against her a little.

“Albrecht, second base,” he read. “Four at-bats, three hits, three triples, four runs batted in.” He stopped and swallowed.

“And it says, in Dad’s writing, in the margin. Three triples. Radio says nobody’s done that here since 1987. Disking the Hanson quarter. Had to stop the tractor twice, I was hollering so loud. Jeff thought I had a heart attack. Good job, bud.”

The whole room laughed, and half of it was crying while it laughed. Jeff was not there, but Jeff’s wife was, at one of the back tables, and she said, loud enough for everybody, “He told me about that!”

Travis put the clipping back in the box, careful, in its place. He kept looking at it.

“I want to tell you something about those games,” he said to the room.

“Every time I came up to bat, the first thing I did was look at the bleachers. Every at-bat. I’d step out, adjust my gloves, and look. And it was always Mom in the third row with the blanket. And I’d look up past her at the parking lot to see if the truck was there.”

He stopped.

“It was never there,” he said. “So I figured he didn’t care much about baseball. I wasn’t mad. I just figured it was a thing he didn’t like, like he doesn’t like fish.” Somebody laughed. “I never knew the radio was on.”

He turned to me. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

There was a whole room waiting. I could have said something better, I suppose. I said the only true thing I had.

“I didn’t think it mattered,” I said. “I thought a radio wasn’t worth anything to a boy. I thought you wanted me in the stands, and I wasn’t, and that was the whole of it. I didn’t want credit for half of something.”