The Envelope My Girl Carried to the Dugout

He ate breakfast standing up. Before he went out the door, he bent down and kissed the top of Clara’s head, which he does not do much anymore now that she is eleven and thinks she is too old for it.

“Proud of you, sis,” he said. “I’ll try to get off early for the drawing.”

Then he drove off toward the field, and Clara sat there with her hand on the top of her head, like she was holding the kiss in.

Saturday was the kind of late October day Nebraska gives you about twice a fall, if you are lucky. Sixty-four degrees.

No wind to speak of. The sky that hard, clean blue you only get when the air has gone dry and cool.

The fall league played on the field by the fairgrounds, the one with the chain-link dugouts and the bleachers with the paint coming off. Clara’s team had the noon game. The drawing was set for two, right after.

Clara played second base in her white and red jersey. She went one for three and caught a pop fly with her eyes closed, which she swore to me she did not. I sat in the bleachers in my jacket and clapped too loud.

I kept looking at the parking lot. I did not know if Tawny would come. Part of me hoped she would not, so I would not have to look at her. The bigger part of me needed her to.

Gail and Addie got there at about one thirty. Gail parked the minivan right up by the fence, close as she could, and came around to help Addie out of the side door.

Addie was in a puffy coat and a stocking cap pulled down over her ears even in that sun.

She was thin, thinner than the last time I had seen her, and pale in that way that sick children get, like the color has been washed down a size.

But she saw Clara out on the field and she lit up. She waved with her whole arm. Clara waved back with her glove and nearly missed a ground ball doing it.

Gail got Addie settled on a camp chair by the end of the dugout with a blanket over her knees and a bottle of water.

Then she came over to the bleachers and sat down by me, and she did not say anything about the bank.

I think she had already decided it was gone and was not going to ask again. That is the kind of woman Gail is. She would rather do without than make a family hurt.

“Big day,” she said.

“Big day,” I said.

The quilting ladies had set up a card table behind the backstop, with the quilt folded over a quilt rack so people could see it, and the stubs from Clara’s ninety-six tickets in a big glass pickle jar. Ida Mae was sitting behind it in a lawn chair like a queen.

At about a quarter to two, a car I knew pulled into the lot and parked at the far end, as far from everything as you could get and still be at the ballfield.

Tawny got out. She was in her old canvas work coat, and she walked across the gravel slowly, with her hands in her pockets and her eyes on the ground. She did not come to where I was sitting.