Chapter 7: The Cookie Lady

The Bowling Green Bandits held their end-of-season ceremony in the Elks Lodge banquet room, under the same glitter banner nobody had taken down.

Somebody had pulled off the KENT + and left BECCA hanging by one corner.

Forty children in green shirts ran in circles around sixty folding chairs.

Eli wore his trophy cap and held my hand and Kent's hand, one in each fist, and swung between us down the aisle.

Parents watched.

Everybody in the county had heard by now.

Rhonda sat in the front row with a purse the size of a suitcase and a look that dared anyone to say a word.

"Mama," Eli whispered, "is the old man coming?"

"He said he would."

"Is he a grandpa?"

"He's your grandpa."

"Will he know about bottle caps?"

"I don't know, baby."

He came in at ten past two, in a clean flannel shirt and the kind of boots a man wears to church.

He stopped at the end of our row and held a mason jar in both hands.

It was full of old bottle caps.

Some were rusted, and some were red, and one was a squashed blue Nehi.

"I found these in the garage," he said to Eli. "They were my father's. I don't have anywhere to put them, and I figured somebody should."

Eli took the jar, held it up to the window, and went completely silent.

"This one is from 1958," he said, finally.

"I believe it."

"Do you want to sit with us?"

Kent's father sat down in the folding chair next to my son and didn't say anything else.

His eyes were wet, and he kept looking at the cowlick.

The coach, a gray-bearded plumber who had been a beloved menace to every four-year-old in Warren County, tapped the microphone.