Every Game

Hollis worked at the lumber yard, six a.m. shifts most of my childhood, and there wasn't a single game of mine, from six-year-old tee-ball through varsity, that he missed for a reason that wasn't a genuine emergency.

I counted once, in high school, out of a strange teenage need to quantify something I couldn't otherwise put into words. Two hundred and eleven games across eleven years of organized baseball. He'd missed four, twice for his own mother's medical emergencies, twice for weather so severe the games themselves got cancelled after he'd already arrived.

My biological father, in that same span of time, sent one birthday card, when I was nine, with no return address and twenty dollars folded inside it that my mother put straight into a savings account rather than let me spend, not out of spite, she told me once, but because she didn't trust that money to mean what money from a father was supposed to mean.

Hollis never mentioned the card. I only knew he knew about it because my mother told me, years later, that he'd been the one to suggest the savings account in the first place.