The Umpire Who Called His Son Out
I bought the rest myself at the sporting goods store in Champaign. A navy umpire shirt and a pair of gray pants, the plain kind.
That was forty-one dollars, and it came out of my grocery money that week. I ate a lot of peanut butter.
My first game was an eight-and-under rec game at the Paxton park, on the diamond closest to the pool, which wasn’t open yet.
It was the second Saturday of April and cold enough that my breath showed behind the mask.
I was ten minutes into it, still figuring out how low to crouch, when I heard a lawn chair unfolding behind the backstop.
I didn’t have to turn around. I would know the squeak of that chair anywhere.
It was my mother. She had on her gray church coat and her winter hat, and she had a red thermos sitting on the ground beside her chair.
She did not wave. She just settled in and folded her hands.
Between innings I walked over to the fence and asked her what in the world she was doing there.
She told me she was watching her son, which was the same answer she gave me when I was seven.
“Mom, it’s thirty-eight degrees. You don’t have to come to these. They’re not even Jace’s games. They’re a bunch of little kids you don’t know.”
“You didn’t have to take that envelope off my table either,” she said. “So I guess we’re both doing things we don’t have to.” Then she held the thermos up to the fence.
She had made me coffee the way my dad used to take it, with too much sugar and a little milk.
I hadn’t had it fixed that way since he passed, and I had to look out at center field for a second before I could drink it.
In the second game, a little girl hit a ball all the way to the fence and ran the bases crying because she was so happy, and her whole team ran out to meet her at home. I gave her the ball.
I took the eighty dollars to the exchange that Sunday evening. Courtney and I trade Jace off in the parking lot of the Casey’s on Route 9, because it is halfway between and neither of us has to look at the other’s house.
Jace climbed into my truck with his bat bag and his catcher’s gear and his phone, and he was already talking about a kid on his team who could throw sixty miles an hour.
I told him to buckle up and that I would be right back.
I walked over to Courtney’s car. She rolled the window down about halfway.
She had on the green sweatshirt she always wore on Sundays, and she looked tired in a way I hadn’t noticed before.
I held out the white envelope with four twenties in it. “That’s toward the travel ball bill,” I said. “The one you sent my mother. I’ll have the rest to you in a few weeks.”
She looked at the envelope and then at me. For a second I thought she was going to say something sharp.
Instead her face went a little red, the way it does when she has been caught at something.
“I sent that to Pam,” she said. “Not to you. I figured, you know, grandmas like to help with that kind of thing. My mom always paid for my extras. Dance, piano, all of it. I just thought.”