The Umpire Who Called His Son Out
He hugged her so hard the whole fence shook, and she laughed and told him he was getting dirt on her good jacket.
“Did you see it, Grandma? Did you see the double?”
“I saw every pitch,” Mom said. “I saw the strike in the fourth too. Your dad was right.”
“I know,” Jace said. “That’s why I tipped my helmet.”
Then I saw Courtney coming down the bleachers. She had her stadium seat under one arm and her water bottle in her hand, and she walked straight past Jace and straight past me and stopped in front of my mother’s lawn chair.
I didn’t hear what she said at first. I saw my mother look up at her.
I saw Courtney’s shoulders shake a little. Then my mother got up out of her lawn chair and put her arms around her.
Later, Mom told me what Courtney had said. That she was sorry for the bill.
That her new mortgage was more than she could carry, and her own mother had always paid for her extras, so she’d assumed mine would too.
She told Mom she had felt sick the minute she dropped the envelope in the mailbox.
That she’d almost called to tell her to throw it away, but she was too embarrassed, and then I had started handing her envelopes, and it got worse every Sunday.
My mother told her that we all do things we’re ashamed of, and that what matters is what we do about it afterward.
Then she told her she’d made too much banana bread, and asked if she wanted some for the drive home.
Jace and I sat on the tailgate of my truck in the Gibson City parking lot for almost an hour after that.
Mom had gone home. Courtney had driven off to pick up some groceries before she got Jace back the next evening.
He was still in his red uniform, with the dirt on his cheek and his cleats on.
I still had on my navy shirt and my gray pants, with the shin guards in my lap. We had a bag of sunflower seeds between us that Mike Daly had given us.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a text from Courtney. I read it, and then I read it again. Then I handed the phone to Jace so he could read it himself.
“I’m covering next season’s fee myself,” it said. “All of it. Please tell your mom thank you for the bread, and that I’m sorry. And Brandon, that was a good game. You called it fair.”
“Dad,” he said. “Do you think Grandma’s going to keep coming to your rec games? Even now that it’s paid?”
“I expect she will,” I said. “I think she likes it out there. And I think the grandmothers would come looking for her if she quit.”
He laughed. Then he leaned his shoulder against mine, the way he used to when he was little and fell asleep against me in the truck on the way home from somewhere.
“Can I come too?” he asked. “On Saturdays, when I don’t have a game? I could help with the bases or something. Or just sit with Grandma.”
“I’d like that,” I said. And I would. I do.
We stayed there until the shadows of the bleachers reached all the way across the infield.
Two of us on a tailgate in a gravel lot in Gibson City, still in our gear, spitting sunflower seeds into the gravel, the score long since final.