The Suit I Wore To The Bleachers

Donna’s hands

Saturday came up hot and blue.

I put on the gray suit, the one I had bought for Shelby’s high school graduation and worn maybe four times since. Donna straightened my tie in the hall mirror, the two of us crowded into the same square of glass.

Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling.

“You look like the day we got married,” she said.

“I was skinnier then.”

“You were scareder then.” She smoothed the lapel flat with both hands, those steady hands that had braided a hair she did not grow and packed a thousand lunches and never once asked for a word of thanks. “Ron. You don’t have to do this for me. I’m a grown woman. I’ve been left off a guest list before. I’ll live.”

“I’m not doing it for you,” I said. “I’m doing it because it’s true.”

She pressed her forehead to my chin for a second. Then she grabbed the folding chairs and the cooler, and Cole came thundering down the stairs in his uniform with his cleats already on, scraping the floor she would fuss about later, and we drove to the ballfield as a family.

The whole family. Every chapter of it.

The suit in the bleachers

The field sits behind the elementary school, a chain link backstop and two sets of aluminum bleachers and a snack shack that sells walking tacos and blue freezies. By ten in the morning the lot was full of trucks.

I will tell you, a man in a full gray suit climbing into aluminum bleachers full of parents in ball caps and sunscreen draws an eye or two.

Hank Mueller, whose boy plays third, slid down to make room. “Ron. You get married this morning and forget to tell us?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“You look sharp.”

“Felt like a day to dress up for,” I said, and left it there.

Donna set up the chairs at the fence line where she could see Cole’s face when he pitched. She had packed orange slices in a margarine tub, cut the way she cut them when he was little, and she passed them down the row to kids who were not even ours, because that is who she is.

Cole took the mound in the top of the first and he found me in the stands before his first pitch. He always does. He looked for the suit. He grinned when he saw it, this huge gap toothed grin, and then he struck the first batter out on three pitches.

I clapped so hard my hands stung. I did not care who saw. I had a boy on a mound and a wife at the fence and the sun on my shoulders, and twenty two thousand dollars gone across town for a party I was not welcome at, and I swear to you I would not have traded my aluminum seat for a throne.