The Suit I Wore To The Bleachers

The decision I did not expect to make

A man can do a few things with a number like twenty two thousand dollars and an insult like that.

He can say no. He can close the checkbook and let her feel what it is to ask for a gift and an exile in the same breath. Part of me wanted to. The oldest, stingiest part.

He can make a speech. He can stand in the venue and say his piece in front of Kyle’s particular people and watch Shelby’s face go white.

I did not want to do either one. I sat with it for three days.

Here is what I came to, and I am still not sure I can explain it so it sounds like sense.

I was not going to punish my daughter with money. Her mother is gone. I promised a dying woman I would see our girl taken care of, and I was not going to let a grudge make a liar of me at the one wedding she would ever have. If Shelby wanted the twenty two thousand dollar day, she could have it. The check was never the fight.

But I was not going to stand in a room that had no chair for my wife and no place for my son. I was not going to put on a boutonniere and smile for Marlene’s photographs while Donna sat home and Cole wondered why his dad went somewhere he was not allowed to follow.

You cannot ask a man to pay for a table and then tell him his family cannot sit at it. A wedding you are asked to pay for but not belong at is not a wedding you attend.

So I wrote the check. Twenty two thousand dollars, to the venue, paid in full, two days early. I put it in the cream colored folder and I drove it over myself and I handed it to the event woman with a smile, because none of this was her fault.

And then I made one other decision. I was going to spend that Saturday exactly where my family was welcome.

I was going to watch my boy pitch in the county final.