The Baton Mom Twirled at Homecoming

The headlights

By the second week the sun was going down earlier, and we were losing the light by the time Mom had warmed up her wrists and done her walking.

Neal fixed that too. He backed the pickup up to the end of the strip every evening and left the headlights on, and when those weren’t enough, he brought over the shop light from our garage on an extension cord.

So there we were every night in a hayfield outside Pauls Valley, an old woman and her daughter, twirling in the headlights of a Chevy, with the neighbor’s cows lined up along the fence to watch us like we were the evening show.

Jesse came out on the evenings he didn’t have practice.

He brought his trumpet and played the school fight song while Mom walked the strip, so she could feel the beat the way she’d feel it on the field.

He’s not a great trumpet player, my son. He would tell you so himself. But he played that fight song a hundred times in that hayfield and never once complained.

Mom had her routine on a little index card in her pocket, in her own handwriting from 1966.

It was short. Walk out, salute, wrist twirl, figure eight, one toss, catch, and walk on.

The toss scared me. Mom wanted the toss. She said it wasn’t the routine without the toss, and the toss was what everybody remembered.

“We’ll see about the toss,” I said, every night. And every night she said, “We will see about it, Dana, because I’m doing it.”

We started low. A toss of a foot, maybe two, just up and back down into her hand.

She’d bend her knees a little the way she had as a girl, and keep her eyes up.

By the end of the second week she was dropping it four times a night. Then three.

Then on a Thursday, under the headlights, with the cows watching, she did it twice in a row clean.

She didn’t cheer. She just nodded, once, like she’d known all along. Then she said, “Again,” and did it again.

The fence line

Teri drove by twice that second week. I recognized her van on the county road, slowing down by the mailbox. Both times she sped up again without turning in.

The third time, on a Friday, she turned in. She parked by the house and walked out back and stood at the fence by the round bales with her arms crossed, in her work clothes from the school office.

I walked over to her. Mom stayed on the strip with Jesse, practicing her salute. I don’t think Mom wanted to hear whatever was about to be said.

“You’re going to get her hurt,” Teri said. She said it quiet, which is worse with Teri. When she yells, it blows over. When she’s quiet, she means it all the way down.

“I talked to her doctor,” I said. “He moved her blood pressure pill to bedtime. That’s probably what made her dizzy in April. She’s got flat shoes, real grass, and Jesse will be right beside her.”

Teri looked at me like I’d slapped her. “You talked to her doctor? Without me?”

“I’m her daughter too,” I said.

“You weren’t there,” she said, and her voice cracked right down the middle. “In April. You were at work. I was the one who found her.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was true. I had been at work.

Teri had come by that morning to drop off some tomato plants, and found Mom on the back steps.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you did the hard part. But Teri, you laughed at her. In front of Kenzie and Jesse, you laughed at her and told her she’d fall on her face.”

Teri flinched. “I was trying to make it light. So she’d let it go.”

“She heard it,” I said. “She folded that letter up and she didn’t say another word. You know what that looked like? It looked like me at fifteen.”

Teri didn’t answer. She uncrossed her arms and put her hands on the top wire of the fence and looked out at Mom, small and slim at the end of the strip, saluting nobody in the evening light.

“She’s going to get hurt,” Teri said again, but softer. Then she turned around, walked back to her van, and drove off.

That evening, after Teri left, Mom said something to me that I didn’t expect. She said, “I’ll ride to the game with you and Neal, I think. Teri doesn’t need to bother.”

It was the first time in years Mom had chosen me for a ride over Teri. It wasn’t spiteful.

But I knew, and Teri would know, what it meant. Mom had heard every word at that fence.