The Camper by the Ballfield

“I’m sorry, bud,” Kyle said. His voice cracked right down the middle. “I’m so sorry. I should have known. I should’ve been here.”

“You were working, Dad.”

“I should’ve been here.”

Colter put his head down on his father’s knee. A 17-year-old boy, six foot one, and he put his head on his daddy’s knee like a little boy. Kyle bent over him and held him.

I turned around and walked back to my car and sat in it. I did not want them to have an audience. Some things belong only to the people they belong to.

Merle’s truck pulled in a few minutes later to drag the infield, and he took one look and found a tire to check.

Later that morning, after Kyle had showered at my house and eaten six eggs and slept two more hours in my recliner, he drove back to his own house to see his wife.

I was not there for that conversation, and I am glad I was not. Kyle told me only a little of it, and I will only tell you a little of it here.

He told her she should have called him the first day she needed money. He told her that he would rather have lost the bonus than his son.

He told her that the old camper behind the house was Colter’s, and it was not going to be rented to anybody, not on Memorial Day and not ever, unless Colter said so.

Then he made her call the couple from Nebraska. Not him. Her. She had taken the booking, and she was the one who had to undo it.

She gave them their deposit back out of the grocery money, and she apologized to them on the phone while Kyle sat at the kitchen table and listened.

And he told her one more thing. He told her she owed his son an apology, and that it had better be to his face, and that it had better be before graduation.

Graduation was Sunday at two o’clock. Powell holds it outside when the weather allows, on the football field, with the stage set up at the south end and folding chairs on the grass.

The football field sits right across the outfield from the ballfield, separated by a low fence with a gate in it.

Sunday morning came up clear and warm, not a cloud anywhere. Kyle and I went to the eight o’clock service together. Colter came too, in his good shirt. We sat in my husband’s pew.

We sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” This time I got through the second verse. Kyle did not. He stood there with the hymnal open and let everybody else sing it for him. I put my hand on his arm.

At one o’clock Colter put on his gown in the camper. I helped him with the zipper in the back.

Kyle got the cap on straight and pinned it with a bobby pin I had in my purse. We all three stood there in that little camper with barely room to turn around.

“Grandma,” Colter said. “Can I keep the camper here through the summer? I’ll pay the power.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” I said. “Your grandpa’s paying the power. He’s been paying it for twenty-eight years. He just didn’t know who it was for.”