The Camper by the Ballfield

The trash bags were sitting on the camper step when I pulled in, four of them, black, tied at the top with the yellow drawstrings the way you tie up kitchen garbage.

It was a Saturday in early May, a little after ten in the morning. The sun was already warm on the back of my neck, and the cottonwoods along the alley were just starting to leaf out.

My grandson Colter was sitting on the bottom step beside the bags with his elbows on his knees. He was 17 years old, six foot one, and the catcher on the high school baseball team. He looked about nine.

“Grandma,” he said. “I’m sorry I bothered you on a Saturday.”

That was the first thing he said. Not that he had been locked out. Not that his things were in garbage bags. He was sorry he had bothered me.

The text had come at a quarter to ten, while I was cleaning out my refrigerator. Five words. Grandma, my key doesn’t work. I read it twice, put the rubber gloves in the sink, and drove straight over.

I want to tell you about that camper before I tell you about anything else, because the camper is the whole story. It was a little old travel trailer, maybe sixteen feet, that my son Kyle bought used the year Colter was born.

Kyle and Colter’s mother took it to the Bighorns every summer when Colter was small. After the divorce it sat behind the house in Powell with flat tires and a wasp nest in the vent.

Then Kyle married Shawna, and Shawna’s two boys moved in. They were nine and eleven then, good enough boys, loud the way boys are loud. The house had three bedrooms, and somebody had to give something up.

Colter was 15 that summer. He came to Kyle on his own and asked if he could fix up the old camper and sleep in it. Kyle said yes. I think Kyle was relieved, though he would never say so.

That boy spent his whole summer on it. He pulled the wasp nest out with a coffee can and a broom handle.

He patched the roof seam, aired up the tires, scrubbed the mildew out of the cushions with bleach water, and ran an extension cord from the garage.

He kept it neater than most grown men keep a shop. His catcher’s gear hung on hooks he screwed into the wall.

His school books were stacked by size. His bed was made every morning, which is more than I could ever say for his father.

For two years he slept out there, winter and summer. In January I bought him a little oil-filled heater because I could not stand the thought of him cold. He thanked me like I had bought him a truck.

And now, three weeks before graduation, the key he had carried for two years did not turn in the lock.

“When did you find out?” I asked him.

“This morning. I stayed at a teammate’s after the game last night. His mom said it was fine. I came back to get my glove for practice and the bags were here.”

“Did Shawna say anything?”

“There’s a note.” He pulled a folded piece of notebook paper out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

It said: Colter, I need the camper. Your stuff is all here. You can sleep on the couch. S.