What she asked
I walked over to the post where she was standing. I did not hurry.
I did not want her to think I was coming over there to fight, and I was not.
Up close her face was pink from the walk, and her jaw was tight. Tracy is not a woman who asks for things.
She arranges things, and other people go along. That is how she has always been.
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“The park’s closed,” she said. “You’ve heard about the water main.”
“I heard,” I said. “I’m sorry. That’s a bad week for it.”
“We leave for state a week from Saturday. We have nowhere to practice.” She swallowed. “The boys asked me if they could come out here. To your field.”
She said it quietly. But it was so still out there that every one of those dads heard it, and every one of the old men, and every one of the twelve girls.
“They asked you?” I said.
“They want to scrimmage the girls,” Tracy said. “They heard about Rylee. They want to hit off a fast pitcher before state. They say their own pitchers are too easy to read.”
She looked down at her hand on the post, and then she looked up again, at me, and she did not look away.
“I know I don’t have any right to ask,” she said. “I know what I did in May. I’ve known for weeks. I just did not know how to say it, and I let it go too long.”
The answer
I could have said no. I want to be honest about that.
There was a part of me that wanted to say it, and to watch her walk back through the hay to her truck by herself.
But that is not who I want to be in front of my daughter.
And those boys had done nothing wrong. They were eleven and twelve years old, the same as our girls.
So I turned around and looked at Rylee, out in the circle with the ball in her glove. “It’s your field,” I said to her. “Your team. What do you think?”
Rylee looked at her aunt a long time. Then she looked at her coach, and at the other girls, and finally at her grandpa in his lawn chair behind the backstop.
“They can come,” she said. “But they have to help pick up the field after. Everybody does. Even the dads.”
“That’s fair,” Tracy said. Her voice cracked a little on it.
“And Aunt Tracy,” Rylee said. “You have to tell the girls what you told my mom. Not to me. To all of them.”
I did not tell her to say that. I want to be clear.
I had never told Rylee to say anything to her aunt at all. That was all hers, and she said it standing on her own rubber.