The Coach Who Would Not Bench Him

At noon, a door at the side of the shop opened, and two men walked out in red work shirts.

It was Walt and Virgil.

They crossed Mill Street in the middle of the day, in front of everybody, and I felt my stomach go to my boots. I thought, They’ve come to tell us to move.

Walt walked straight up to me with a bucket in each hand. I had not seen the buckets. He had brought them from the shop.

“Lunch break,” he said. “We figured we’d spend it here.”

“Walt, if Tobias finds out.”

“He didn’t send us, Dell.” He looked at the ground. “He told us not to come. I’ve worked for that man twenty-two years.” He picked up a sponge. “I said I was on my lunch.”

They washed cars for the whole hour. A little after one, three more men from the shop came across, and then the girl who answers the front phone, and by two o’clock the Tobias Tire shirts on our lot outnumbered the Cardinals’ shirts. I did not say one word about it to anyone.

Oleta’s sign-up sheet had eighty numbered lines, one for every family, and at every car whoever held the clipboard asked, “Family name?” and wrote it down with what they gave. Some wrote ten dollars. Some wrote a hundred. Hank wrote two hundred and a case of sponges, and I only learned that because I read the sheet. Oleta’s daughter kept tally marks on the lid of a cooler, and when she was done she counted two hundred and eleven vehicles.

At twenty minutes to six, with the sun still high and the afternoon heat finally starting to break, the line had thinned to almost nothing. The boys were wrung out, sitting in a row on the curb with their feet in a bucket, passing around a bag of Hank’s peppermints. And Oleta sat down at the folding table with the coffee can, a stack of envelopes, and a calculator, and she counted.

She counted twice. The second time she counted out loud, and I stood behind her with my hands in my pockets.

“Three thousand, one hundred and eighty-four dollars,” she said. She put the pencil down. “Seventy-nine families.”

I was sixteen dollars and one family short after a day like that, and I had my wallet half out.

Oleta put her hand flat on my arm. “No,” she said. “Wait.”

“Oleta, it’s sixteen dollars.”

“Then it’ll come.” She did not look up. “Dell. It always comes.”

And that is when we heard the bicycle.

It came down Mill Street from the direction of the church, fast, with a kid standing on the pedals and a plastic sandwich bag clenched in one fist. It turned in off the road, skidded in the gravel, and dropped over on its side about five feet from the table. The boy stood up, out of breath, red in the face.

It was Mason.

He did not look at me. He looked at Oleta, and he held out the sandwich bag in both hands.

“It’s from my birthday,” he said. “And the lawn. It’s sixteen dollars, I counted. Is it enough?”

Nobody said a word. Thirteen Cardinals sat on the curb with their feet in a bucket and looked at the grandson of the man who had taken their jerseys.