The Tournament I Called Behind the Plate

The Mask Went On

The sun was already hot on the back of my neck when I pulled the mask down and crouched behind home plate at the Boone County diamonds, and the first batter stepping into the box was my own son.

Hayden was eleven that summer. He knocked the dirt off his cleats with the end of the bat, the way I taught him, the way my dad taught me, and he did not look at the man in the blue shirt and the chest protector.

He did not need to. He knew who I was. By that Saturday, most of the park did.

I had never called a game with my boy hitting in it. It was the first tournament of his travel season, and the umpire assigned to the plate had not driven in.

I will get to how I ended up back there. First I have to tell you about a Tuesday in May, and the thing Crystal did that I did not see coming, even after three years of being her ex-husband.

I am Ross. I am thirty-six, I rent the back half of a duplex off the county road, and I am Hayden’s dad every other weekend and most Wednesdays when the season lets me.

That is the whole shape of my life now, and I had made my peace with most of it. Then the bill came.

The Bill She Sent

My mother called me at the lumber yard on a Tuesday, and I could tell from her first word that something was wrong.

“Rossie,” she said. She only calls me that when she is upset. “I got something in the mail I don’t understand.”

Mom is Lois. She is sixty-eight, she lives alone in the house I grew up in over in Thorntown, and she drives a fifteen-year-old Buick that she washes in the driveway every Sunday after church.

She does not have money to spare and never pretends she does.

“What came in the mail?” I said.

“An invoice,” she said. The word sounded strange in her mouth. “From Crystal. It says here, half of Hayden’s summer ball, four hundred and fifty dollars, and there’s a little note.”

I set down the board I was cutting. “Read me the note.”

“It says, since Ross is behind, I thought Grandma might want to help Hayden play.” She was quiet a second. “Rossie, are you behind on something?”

I was not behind on anything that mattered. I had never missed a support payment, not once, not the month the truck threw a water pump and not the month I had the flu and lost a week of hours.