The Suit I Wore To The Bleachers

The double

It was a close game. Two to one, their favor, into the bottom of the fifth.

Cole came up with a runner on first and two outs. He is not a big kid. He chokes up on the bat and he has a careful, patient eye, and the other team’s pitcher had been getting him to chase all day.

Donna stood up at the fence. She does not even know she does it.

First pitch, ball. Second pitch, he fouled it straight back into the chain link, and the whole set of bleachers flinched.

Third pitch, the kid left one out over the plate, and my son did not chase it. He turned on it.

I have watched a lot of baseball. I have never heard a sound like that bat made. He drove it into the gap in left center, a clean line that just kept going, and the runner from first came all the way around, and Cole pulled into second standing up with his helmet flying off and his hair stuck to his forehead.

Tie game.

And he stood on that base, chest heaving, and he found me again. He looked right up into those bleachers, right at the gray suit standing and hollering, and he pointed at me with both hands.

Not at the crowd. Not at his coach. At me. At us.

Donna had both fists pressed to her mouth. Hank Mueller was pounding me on the back. And I stood there in my wedding suit at a twelve year old’s ballgame and cried in front of forty people I have known my whole life, and not one of them thought less of me for it.

They won it in the next inning. The leadoff kid walked, stole second, and came home on a bloop that dropped between three fielders who all called it and none of them caught it. Cole scored ahead of him on the same play, slid home in a cloud of red dust that ruined his whites and did not matter one bit. The bench emptied. The parents were on their feet. Donna had grass stains on the knees of her good slacks from kneeling at the fence, and she did not care, and I loved her so much right then I could not speak.

Afterward Cole came up the bleachers two at a time and threw his arms around me, sweaty and filthy and grinning, and got red dirt all over the gray suit, and I held on to him and let him.

“You saw it,” he said. “You saw the double.”

“I saw it, bud. Best swing I ever watched.”

“I pointed at you.”

“I know you did.”

“Because you picked us,” he said, into my shoulder, and I had to look up at the sky a minute before I could answer that one.