Part 3 — The Brick Wall
The league president, a solemn woman named Mrs. Calloway, stapled the dealership receipt to the white copy and read it aloud to the room.
“Sixteen thousand, four hundred eighty dollars. Used bass boat, 2018. Purchased by D. Spratt, paid in full. Seven days after the brick campaign closed.”
Sixty parents sat in folding chairs in the meeting room, and not one of them spoke.
Doyle opened his mouth, closed it, and put his hands flat on the table. The tumbler in front of him was empty.
“I was going to pay it back,” he said. “I swear to God, Gail. I only meant to borrow.”
“You borrowed from a nine-year-old with duct tape on his shoes,” Tasha Whitlow said. She stood up with Kendrick beside her. “And you looked at my nails.”
Wanda, who runs the print shop, laid a pink copy in front of every parent in the room. One hundred seventy-five bricks, one hundred seventy-five receipts.
I had stood in the snack shack for years chalking the word paid on a board for children who could not pay, and in the end it was a stack of carbon paper that did the paying.
The president took the box to the Virginia attorney generals office the next morning, as the law requires when charity money is taken. But she also said that restitution would be the first thing the commonwealths attorney looked for.
Doyle resigned that night. He signed the bass boat over to the league the following afternoon, and the dealership agreed to buy it back for fourteen thousand dollars. The league made up the rest through a bake sale that raised sixteen hundred in a single Saturday.
The money bought one hundred sixty-three bricks, so that every parent who had paid got a brick on the new backstop wall. Wanda engraved them herself.
Kendrick got a brand-new pair of cleats, a size seven, in navy blue. Cory got a pair too, and a glove. Ms. Naomi drove them to the shoe store in Forest after school, and the children came out carrying the boxes like trophies.
Doyle came to the snack shack the first week of the new season. He stood in front of the window with his cap in his hands.
I gave him a hot dog and chalked the word paid on the board. He cried into the mustard.
Cory is on the front of the wall, fourth brick from the left. It says, in plain engraved letters, “Everybody plays.”