The Grills We Set Up Across the Road

“Thank you for your service, ladies.”

Travis Kemp said it from the front of the ag room on a Tuesday night in September, with the welding booths dark behind him and the smell of cut metal still in the air.

He held up a wooden plaque with a brass plate screwed to the middle. Six names were engraved on it. Ours. Connie, Lori, Jan, Barb, Patty, and Deb Schroeder. That last one is me.

“Twenty-two years,” Travis said, and he smiled like a man handing out a door prize. “That’s a lot of hamburgers. The board wanted you to have something to hang up.”

I am a school cook. I have made lunch for the kids in our town for nineteen years, and I can tell you exactly how a room sounds when people know something is wrong and nobody wants to be first to say it.

The ag room sounded like that.

“Now, the reason we’re doing this tonight,” Travis went on, “is that the board voted to try something new with the concession stand this year. We’ve signed with a food truck out of Grand Island. Prairie Smoke. Good outfit, they do the fair.”

He set the plaque on the table in front of us. Jan didn’t touch it. Neither did I.

“They’ll run the stand every home game,” he said. “They pay the boosters $3,000 a season, flat. No volunteers to chase, no work for you ladies, no inventory sitting in the school freezer. It’s clean money.”

Connie, who is seventy, folded her hands on the table. Her knuckles had gone white.

“We clear about nine thousand,” she said quietly. “Some years more.”

“I’ve seen the books,” Travis said. “And I appreciate it. I do. But that’s nine thousand with six people working every Friday night for free, and you’re all, well.” He stopped.

“We’re all what,” said Lori.

“Not getting any younger,” he said, and he had the decency to look at the floor when he said it.

Our town has about 1,400 people in it. We play Class C football, eleven-man, on a field with a cinder track around it and a scoreboard that still has a light bulb out in the H of HOME. You can see the grain elevator from the top row of the bleachers.

For twenty-two years the six of us ran the concession stand at every home game. Burgers, hot dogs, walking tacos in the little chip bags, coffee, pop, and Patty’s cinnamon rolls, which people drove in from the county just to buy. We started it when our own kids were in the band and on the team.

Now most of us were grandmothers. Our grandkids were in the band now.

The money went two places. It bought band uniforms, a few at a time, because a full set costs more than this town has ever had in one pile. And it paid a $1,000 scholarship every spring to a senior who was going on to school, any school, a welding program or a nursing program or the university.

That scholarship had our six names on it too. It was called the Stand Moms Scholarship. Some kid’s mother had named it that in 2009 and it had stuck.

“I’d like to ask a question,” I said.

Travis nodded. He is forty-one and sells insurance on Main Street, and he moved back to town four years ago with his wife, who grew up here. He had been booster president for four months. He coached Little League and he was good to the kids. I want to say that plainly, because I was angry that night, and I still knew it was true.