The Memorial Fund My Niece Emptied

The flyer was taped to the glass door of the Co-op, right at eye level, where nobody could miss it.

I saw it on a Thursday in late August, three weeks after we buried my husband. I was there for a bag of layer feed and a gallon of milk.

Wes had been gone twenty-two days.

I was still at the stage where I bought milk for two and poured one glass down the drain at night, because forty-four years of habit does not quit in three weeks.

The flyer had his picture on it. His good picture, the one from the church directory, where he is squinting a little and half smiling like somebody just told him a joke in the pew behind him.

Under his face it said, in a nice curled font, “A Bench for Coach Wes.”

I stood there in the doorway with a cart handle in my hand and I read it twice.

It said the family was raising money to put a permanent memorial bench behind home plate at the Legion field, where Wes coached boys’ baseball for thirty-one summers.

It said donations could be sent through an online page, and it had a little square code to point your phone at.

It said, at the bottom, “Organized by his loving niece, Shelby.”

I want to be honest about the first thing I felt, because it was not suspicion.

The first thing I felt was my throat closing up, right there by the feed sacks, because somebody had thought of it.

A bench. Behind home plate. For a man who stood behind that same backstop in a windbreaker every spring from the time he was twenty-six.

It was exactly right. It was the most right thing anybody had said since the funeral.

So I did not question it. Why would I.

Shelby is my sister Darlene’s girl. I held her the week she was born. I have a picture of her at four, asleep in Wes’s lap in the dugout, a batting helmet way too big slid down over her eyes.

She called me the next day, and she was crying a little, the good kind of crying.

“I hope it’s okay, Aunt Verna,” she said. “I should have asked you first. I just, I woke up one morning and I couldn’t stand that there was nothing out there with his name on it.”

What am I going to say to that. I told her it was the sweetest thing anybody had done. I told her Wes would have been embarrassed and secretly thrilled, which was the truth of the man.

She said she already had it all set up. She said she had talked to a man about the bench, a real nice one, cast aluminum with a cedar seat, with a brass plate.

She said she figured they would need around two thousand dollars to do it right, with the concrete pad and the engraving and all.

I told her God bless her and I meant it.

That was the end of August.

Now I have to tell you about this town, so you understand what happened next.