The Camper by the Ballfield

We towed that camper eleven blocks across Powell at about fifteen miles an hour. I rode in the passenger seat with my hand on the dash. People waved.

A man mowing his yard stopped and took his hat off, the way you do for a funeral, and then put it back on and laughed when he saw it was me.

Merle backed it onto the grass of my lot like he was parking a baby buggy.

He put it right beside the old cottonwood, maybe forty feet from the backstop of the ballfield. You could see the bleachers and the chain-link from the door.

I dug the power cord out of the front bin and plugged it into the outlet my husband had put on that pole twenty-eight years ago. I said a little prayer first. Then I flipped the breaker on.

The lights came on the first try.

Colter was at practice. The team practiced Sunday afternoons in May because the season ran right up against graduation, and their coach was a man who believed in practicing. I sent Colter a text that said: Come to Grandpa’s lot when you’re done.

He came walking over from the field about four o’clock. It was a clear May afternoon, warm, not a cloud over the Big Horn Basin.

He had on his gray baseball T-shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his practice pants with the dirt still on the knees.

He stopped about twenty feet off and looked at the camper. Then he looked at me, standing by the open door in my purple windbreaker. Then he looked at the camper again.

“Grandma,” he said. “Whose is that?”

“Yours,” I said. “For as long as you need it.”

I held out the key. It was one key on a plain ring, nothing fancy. My husband had always kept it on a big wooden fishing bobber so he would not lose it in the lake, but I had taken the bobber off.

Colter took the key. He held it up in front of his face like he could not believe it was only one small key. He turned it over in the light.

Then he half smiled. Not a full smile. Colter has never been a full-smile boy. It was the half smile he gets when a pitcher throws him a fastball he was waiting for.

“Grandma,” he said. “It’s three weeks.”

“Then it’s yours for three weeks.”

Merle had been leaning on his truck the whole time. He walked over then and shook Colter’s hand like he was a grown man. “Nice spot,” Merle said. “I’ll see you at six in the morning when I drag the infield. Don’t sleep through it.”

That was all he said. He got in his truck and drove off.

Colter and I went back to my house and got the trash bags. The refrigerator had quit on me years ago, and there was no water hooked up, only jugs. He said that was fine.

He unpacked them in about twenty minutes. He hung his catcher’s gear on the back of the door. He stacked his books by size on the little table. He made the bed.

On Monday morning Colter came through my cafeteria line at the high school.

I should explain that I run the kitchen at the elementary school, but the district had me covering breakfast at the high school that spring because their manager had a new baby. So I saw him every morning.