For my grandmother’s 81st birthday I spent $412 on a seat behind home plate, and at the gate she slid it back under the ticket window glass and said, “Put me in the bleachers, row eleven, seat four.” I was furious with her until the sixth inning, when an old man came down the bleacher steps checking every face.
That ticket was most of my October paycheck.
I bought it because Grandpa Jeff listened to every home game on the radio for forty years, and she never once went with him.
Not one game.
He died nineteen years ago and she still keeps that radio on the kitchen windowsill, tuned to the station, volume on two.
I figured a good seat and a hot dog would be the easiest day I ever gave her.
“You’re really doing this,” I said at the window.
“I’m really doing this, Erik.”
The clerk had a name tag that said Latonya and long gold nails. She looked at the ticket, then at Grandma, then at me.
“Ma’am, that’s the BEST seat in the park,” she said.
“I know what it is,” Grandma said. “Row ELEVEN. Seat FOUR. If somebody’s in it, I’ll pay them to move.”
Latonya typed something. Then she picked up a desk phone, turned her back to us and talked into it with her hand cupped over the receiver.
I figured she was asking a manager how you refund a birthday.
She didn’t refund anything.
She printed a $9 ticket, pushed it under the glass and said, “Enjoy the game, ma’am.”
Nobody sits out there. It’s a green plank bench past the left field wall with gum on it and a view of the back of the scoreboard.
I sat next to her because what else was I going to do.
I was MAD.
“You could’ve told me before I paid,” I said.
“Then you wouldn’t have bought anything.”
“That’s not an answer, Grandma.”
She patted my knee. Then she opened her purse and took out a pencil stub.
And a scorecard.
It was folded in four and gone soft at the creases, yellow as old piano keys. Half the boxes were already filled in, in pencil, in her slanted handwriting.
The date at the top said August 1968.
She flattened it on her knee and started scoring today’s game in the empty columns, like she was picking up where somebody had stopped.
A man two rows down was eating sunflower seeds out of a coffee can and spitting the shells into his own cup holder.
“Since when do you keep score?” I said.
“Since before your mother.”
“Grandpa never said anything.”
“Your grandpa didn’t know.”
She said it to the field, not to me.
By the fifth inning she’d quit eating. By the sixth the pencil had quit too.
Her hand was shaking on the card.
“You cold?” I said.
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t.
Somewhere behind us the speakers had gone quiet. The guy who’d been calling the batters all afternoon in that slow old voice just stopped, and two batters came up with nobody saying their names.
Then I saw him.
An old man in a red team windbreaker, a lanyard swinging on his chest, was coming down the bleacher steps one at a time with his hand on the rail.
He’d stop. Look along a row. Take one more step.
Row thirteen.
Row twelve.
He stopped at the end of ours.
He never looked at the game. Not once.
Grandma didn’t turn her head. She kept her eyes on the infield like the count was full and it mattered.
He looked at her for a long time. Then down at the card on her knee.
“Where’d you get that?” he said.
It was the voice from the speakers.
“You know where I got it, Clifford,” Grandma said.
He sat down on the plank an arm’s length from her, slowly, like his knees cost money.
“Fifty-seven years,” he said. “Fifty-seven years, Patsy, and you walk up to Latonya’s window and ask for row eleven.”
“You told me you’d be back by the seventh.”
“I was back by the seventh.”
Grandma’s mouth went flat. She didn’t answer that.
He unzipped the windbreaker and took out his wallet, and from behind his driver’s license he pulled a second scorecard. Folded in four. The same yellow.
August 1968 at the top. The visitors’ side.
Both cards stopped in the seventh inning.
Neither one had a final score.
He held his up next to hers, and then he looked past her, at me. At my face. My chin. My ears, which everybody in our family says came from nowhere.
His hand started shaking the same way hers had.
“Patsy,” he said. “HOW OLD IS HIS MOTHER?”
Grandma closed her fist around the pencil and watched the pitcher.
My mother was born in April of 1969.
Fifty-six
Nobody answered him, so I did.
“Fifty-six,” I said. “She’ll be fifty-seven in April.”
I don’t know why I said it. He was an old man with a shaking hand and he asked, and I’ve been answering old men’s questions politely my whole life.
Grandma’s head came around. She looked at me like I’d dropped her purse in a puddle.
Clifford didn’t look at either of us. He looked at the card in his hand and moved his lips. August. September. October. He got to April and stopped counting on his fingers because he’d run out of fingers on one hand and didn’t want to start the other.
“Eight months,” he said.
“Clifford,” Grandma said.
“Eight months, Patsy.”
The guy with the coffee can had turned all the way around on his bench to watch us.
I took my phone out. I don’t know who I meant to call. My mother, maybe, to ask her if she’d ever heard the name Clifford. Maybe nobody. I just wanted something in my hand that wasn’t a $9 ticket.
Grandma put her hand flat over the screen.
“Your mother doesn’t know,” she said. “And you’re not going to be the one who tells her at a ballgame.”
I looked at the card on her knee. In the seventh-inning column, where the runs should have been, she’d written something across three boxes in tiny pencil.
No runs in those boxes. I couldn’t read it upside down.
Volume two
I grew up in that kitchen.
Mom worked second shift at the hospital laundry for most of my childhood, so from three in the afternoon until she picked me up at midnight I was at Grandma and Grandpa’s on the east side, doing homework on the oilcloth table under the window with the radio.
Grandpa Jeff carried mail for thirty-one years. He’d come home, take his shoes off at the back door and turn the knob on that radio before he said hello to anybody.
Every home game. April to September.
He had one rule about it. Nobody touched the dial. Volume stayed on two for the first six innings, low enough to talk over.
Then in the seventh he’d reach up and turn it to five.
Every time. He never explained it and I never asked, because I was eight and I figured that’s just when baseball got good.
And every time he did it, he’d look over at Grandma at the stove.
She never looked back. She’d stir whatever she was stirring.
There’s one picture of their wedding in the hallway. It’s not a church picture. It’s the two of them on the courthouse steps, Grandpa in a borrowed suit and Grandma in a winter coat buttoned all the way down, and somebody wrote on the bottom in ballpoint, October 12, 1968.
My whole life, the family joke was that Mom came two months early and still weighed nine pounds.
Grandpa used to tell it at Thanksgiving. “Nine pounds, two months early. Your mother was in a hurry.” Everybody laughed. Grandma would get up for more rolls.
And the ears. Nobody in either family has my ears. Mom has them. I have them. My aunt Katie used to flick them at Christmas and say we must’ve come from the milkman.
Grandpa was the milkman joke’s punchline and he laughed harder than anybody.
That’s what I was thinking about on the bench, in that order. The coat buttoned to the bottom. The two months. The ears.
Then Clifford stood up.
“I have to call the stretch,” he said. “I’ve called every stretch in this park since 1968. Don’t you leave, Patsy.”
The card by the phone
He went up the bleacher steps a lot faster than he came down them.
“Grandma,” I said. “Who is that?”
“That’s Clifford Santoro.”
“I know his name. I heard you say it.”
“Then you know who he is.”
I didn’t, but the guy with the coffee can did. He leaned up over the back of his bench.
“That’s Cliff,” he said. “He’s the voice. He’s been on the mic here since before I was born. They got his picture on the wall by the gate. He’s retiring next Sunday, they’re doing a whole night for him.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sorry, I’m in your business,” he said, and went back to his seeds.
I stood up. “We’re going.”
“I’m finishing the game.”
“Grandma, you’re shaking. You haven’t eaten since the parking lot. I’m taking you home.”
“Sit down, Erik.”
I didn’t sit down. I walked up to the concourse and around to the gate, because I wanted my $412 back and because I wanted to know what Latonya had said into that phone with her hand over it.
She was alone at the window, counting a drawer.
“Who’d you call,” I said.
She looked at me for a second. Then she reached over and peeled something off the wall next to her desk phone and slid it under the glass.
It was an index card, brown at the edges, with about fifteen pieces of tape on it, layered over each other like it had been moved a lot.
In blue marker it said: If anybody asks for Row 11 Seat 4 — call the booth. Ext. 210. Any game. — C.S.
“That card’s been by this phone longer than I’ve worked here,” Latonya said. “Twenty-two years. The lady before me trained me on it. Said the man upstairs asked for one thing in fifty years and that was it. Nobody ever asked. Not once. Till your grandma.”
“So you called him.”
“He’s a nice old man,” she said. “I figured he’d want to know.”
“What about my refund?”
“Baby, that seat’s sold to somebody else now. I can’t refund a birthday.”
I took the card. She didn’t stop me.
When I got back to row eleven Grandma hadn’t moved, and the speakers came on with that slow voice again.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the seventh-inning stretch.”
Rita
The whole park stood up. Grandma didn’t.
I sat down next to her with the index card in my hand. She looked at it and put her pencil back on her own card.
“And before we sing,” the speakers said, “I’ve got one I’ve been holding a long time.”
Grandma’s pencil stopped.
“A very happy birthday to Patsy, out in the left field bleachers. Row eleven. She kept the home book in this park in the summer of 1968, and she kept it better than I ever kept the visitors.”
People turned around. A whole section of people in front of us, looking back past the wall at the bleachers, looking for whoever Patsy was.
The coffee can man pointed at her and clapped.
Grandma kept her eyes on the field.
The song started. I didn’t sing it.
When it was over, Clifford came back down. He was out of breath and pleased with himself, and he sat on the plank the same arm’s length away like he’d left his spot there.
“I wanted to do that for fifty-seven years,” he said.
“I know you did,” Grandma said.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you. I’ve got a lot to ask him.” He nodded at me. “I’ve got a son. Hunter. He runs the front office here now, he’s the general manager. He’s got two girls in college. That boy’s got cousins, Patsy. He’s got an uncle.”
Hunter. The general manager. I didn’t say anything.
“Rita passed in March,” he said. “Pancreas. It was quick.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because nobody else was going to.
“Fifty-nine years married,” he said. “Fifty-nine years in June. And the whole time I’m up there in that booth, every Sunday, I’m looking out at row eleven.”
I did the math. I’m not good at it, but it isn’t hard math.
Fifty-nine years married in June meant he got married in June of 1966.
The scorecards said August 1968.
“You were married,” I said.
He didn’t even slow down. “I was a kid. We were both kids. You don’t understand what it was like back then.”
“You were married to Rita when you were sitting out here with my grandmother.”
“That’s not the part that matters here,” Clifford said. “The part that matters is your mother.”
Grandma unfolded her card the rest of the way and turned it so I could read the seventh inning.
The seventh inning, 1968
It was written across the home side’s seventh-inning boxes in pencil, small and slanted, pressed so hard the paper had gone shiny.
7th — C. on the mic. “Happy 2nd anniv. to my wife Rita, sec. 104.”
That was all. No runs. No outs. Nothing after it.
Clifford was looking at it too. He could read it upside down fine.
“Your first game on the microphone,” Grandma said. “Dino Thorson had his stroke in the fourth and they sent you up. You said you’d be back by the seventh. I’d come to tell you something that day, Clifford. I’d been sick every morning for three weeks.”
“Patsy.”
“And in the seventh the speakers came on, and it was you. First thing you ever said into that microphone. Happy anniversary to your wife, in section one-oh-four.”
She tapped the pencil on the box.
“I wrote it down. I don’t know why. I was keeping score.”
“I came back down,” he said. “In the seventh. I came back and you were gone.”
“You came back down with Rita,” Grandma said. “I watched you walk her in from the concourse. I went out the left field gate before you got to the steps.”
Clifford opened his mouth and closed it.
I looked at his card. The visitors’ side. His handwriting was neater than hers, all capitals. It stopped in the seventh too. Top of the inning, two outs, a runner on first, and then nothing.
He’d quit scoring when he went up to the booth. She’d quit when he came on the air.
“I looked for you,” he said. “I called your mother’s house. I went by the shoe store. I left that card at the window.”
“You left a card at a window,” Grandma said. “Jeff Dunham came and got me off the curb outside that gate. He was on his mail route. He drove me home in a government truck, which he could’ve lost his job for.”
She folded her scorecard back up in four.
“He asked me one question in that truck,” she said. “Just one. I told him the truth, and he never asked another one for thirty-eight years.”
Down on the field the visitors were changing pitchers. The speakers played organ music.
“Grandpa knew,” I said.
“Your grandpa knew whose voice that was every time he turned on that radio,” she said. “He turned it up in the seventh so I’d never have to pretend in my own kitchen. That was Jeff.”
Clifford’s card
Clifford put his card face down on his knee.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I was wrong in 1968. I was twenty-six and I was stupid and I had a wife, I’ll say it. But that’s my daughter. You can’t keep that from me now. Rita’s gone. There’s nobody left to hurt.”
“There’s Melissa,” Grandma said.
“Melissa.” He said the name like he was trying it on. “Melissa. That’s her name? I don’t even know her name, Patsy. You know what that’s like? I’ve got a farewell night next Sunday and twelve thousand people are going to stand up for me, and I don’t know my own daughter’s name.”
“You’ve got Hunter,” I said.
“Hunter doesn’t speak to me,” he said. “Hunter sided with his mother on everything for thirty years. Hunter put me in this windbreaker and gave me a farewell night so he could stop paying me. I’ve got a son who won’t eat dinner with me and two granddaughters who send a card at Christmas. And I’ve got a daughter I never met and a grandson with my ears sitting right here in my bleachers.”
He reached over and touched my ear. I let him, because I didn’t know what else to do.
“I’ll do a test,” he said. “I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay for anything. I’ll put her in the will. I’ll get her a seat behind home plate for life, I’ll get her up in the booth next Sunday, I’ll introduce her on the microphone in front of the whole city, Patsy. You know I can do that. I just did it for you.”
He’d just done it. Happy birthday to Patsy, row eleven, in front of eight thousand people, without asking her. And he’d do it next Sunday with my mother’s name, with twelve thousand.
“You’re not putting my mother on that microphone,” I said.
“That’s not your call, son.”
I held up Latonya’s index card. Call the booth. Ext. 210.
“Hunter’s office is upstairs from the booth?” I said.
He looked at the card. Then at me.
“If her name or my grandmother’s name comes out of those speakers again,” I said, “next Sunday or ever, I walk up to the general manager’s office with this card and both of those scorecards. And I read him the seventh inning.”
“You wouldn’t.”
I held my hand out for his scorecard.
He didn’t give it to me. He sat there with it on his knee for a long time, and the organ played, and the visitors’ new pitcher threw his warmups.
“She’s fifty-six years old,” he said finally. “I’m eighty-three. You want me to wait for what?”
“For me to tell her,” I said. “Me. Not a speaker. Then she decides if she wants your phone number.”
“And if she says no?”
“Then she says no.”
He put the scorecard back behind his driver’s license and zipped the windbreaker up to his chin.
“I could just find her,” he said. “Melissa Dunham. It’s not a big city.”
“You could,” Grandma said. “You found row eleven fast enough.”
He stood up. His knees made a noise. He went up the bleacher steps one at a time with his hand on the rail, and he didn’t look back, and in the bottom of the seventh the speakers came on in that slow voice and said the next batter’s name like nothing had happened.
Grandma unfolded her card again and picked up the pencil.
“Two outs,” she said. “Runner on first. Who’s up?”
Latonya’s window
I told my mother on a Thursday, at her own kitchen table, with the radio from Grandma’s windowsill between us because Grandma said I should bring it.
She asked me three things. Whether Grandpa knew. When. And whether the man had ever come looking.
“Once,” I said. “With a card by a phone.”
She didn’t call me for eleven days. She didn’t call Grandma for longer. On the twelfth day she texted me a picture of her own ears in the bathroom mirror and nothing else.
I don’t know what she’ll do about Clifford. That’s hers.
His farewell night came and went. Twelve thousand people stood up. I listened on the radio at Grandma’s, volume on two, and he thanked Hunter and Rita and the city of Rochester, and nobody else.
The next home Sunday I drove Grandma back and walked her up to the gate.
Latonya was at the window. The spot on the wall by her phone had a clean square where the card used to be.
I slid a twenty under the glass.
“Row eleven,” I said. “Seats four and five.”
Latonya looked at Grandma, then at me, and printed them without asking anybody.
Out on the plank, Grandma flattened a new scorecard on her knee and handed me the pencil stub.
“You keep the visitors,” she said. “I’ll do home.”
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody whose grandmother has a radio she won’t let anybody touch.
That moment in the bleachers has the same sting as a stranger deciding what seat a woman my size deserved. For more family tensions that surface in unexpected places, read the wedding hall story where a mother assumed her older son would sign and the veil with little anchors sewn into it.
