“Crystal,” I said, and I did not need the microphone, because thirty years of coaching had given me a voice that could be heard across a football field, “I have a question. Would you like to answer it for the whole room, or shall Jimmy ask you in the car?” Three hundred guests in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Capstone had gone absolutely still. Under the balloon arch, the cheer squad of Tuscaloosa County High, twenty two girls in satin jackets, stood together holding their pom poms in their arms. Kaylee stood in the middle of them in a pale blue gown, with her mouth open and her eyes enormous.
Jimmy had not moved. He stood at the cake table with the bank statement in his hands, reading it for the third time. He is a big man, my son, a good one, a high school football coach with a kind of mild stubbornness that he got from his father. “Sixteen deposits,” he said, to nobody. “Thirty eight thousand dollars each, for four years. Six hundred eight thousand dollars.” He looked at his wife. “Crystal, you told me the royalties dried up. You told me Mama was living on her pension. I have been sending her a check for two hundred dollars every month since 2020 because I thought she needed it.”
“Jimmy,” Crystal said brightly, “this is hardly the place.” She was wearing a long red dress and a diamond tennis bracelet that I had never seen. She smiled at the guests, on one side and then on the other, like a hostess calming a restless dinner. “Bonnie Sue is confused. She has not understood the paperwork since her surgery. We set up that account for her protection.” “I understood it well enough to read the bank statement,” I said. “And I understood well enough to call the sports company and ask who endorsed those checks.” I held up my phone. “The nice lawyer in Atlanta has a scan of every signature. They are all mine. Every one was written by you, honey.”
A red and white pom pom and a bank statement set on a sweet sixteen cake table showed a family who had really been paying for the party.
A sound went through the ballroom, a long, low breath, the sound of three hundred people changing their minds at once. Crystal heard it. The brightness fell off her face like a mask. Her red lips trembled. “I did it for Kaylee,” she said. “Jimmy makes forty two thousand a year. I wanted her to have things. I wanted her to be somebody.” “Mama,” said a small clear voice from the middle of the room. Kaylee had come forward, in her blue gown, holding a pom pom in each hand. “Are you saying that the Jeep is Grandma the money of Bonnie Sue?” Crystal said nothing. “Are you saying that this party is?” Her mother turned away.
Kaylee walked across the ballroom floor in her satin heels. She did not hurry. She came to me and put her arms around my waist, and I felt her small shoulders shaking against me. Then she lifted her head and looked at the guests. “My grandmother invented this,” she said, and held up the red and white pom pom. “She invented the thing that my whole squad is holding. She won eleven state championships. She taught me my first cartwheel on the lawn when I was four. And my mother told you that she is on a fixed income.” She turned to Crystal. “You should be ashamed.”
Something remarkable happened then. One of the girls on the squad, Tamika, the captain, a tall senior with braids, raised her pom pom over her head. Then another. Then all twenty two, until there was a field of red and white in the air, rustling, flashing under the chandeliers. They did not cheer. They simply held them up, in silence, for me. I stood in my good blue pantsuit at the edge of the dance floor, seventy one years old, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. I had coached those girls for thirty one years, and none had ever stood up for me, and I had never needed one to.
I did not make a scene after that. I took Jimmy outside, onto the veranda, with the warm night wrapped around us and the cicadas ringing in the live oaks. He was crying, openly, with his big hands over his face. “Mama, I did not know,” he said. “I swear on my life.” I believed him. I put my hand against his cheek, the way I had when he was little and scraped his knee. “I know, baby,” I said. “You were trusting. That is not a crime.” He leaned his forehead against mine. We stood like that for a long time, a mother and a son, in the sound of the cicadas.
Here is what we did. The Jeep went back to the dealer on Monday. Crystal agreed, with a lawyer at her elbow, to repay the six hundred eight thousand dollars out of the sale of their house and the liquidation of two accounts that I had not known existed. Jimmy and Kaylee kept the small house on Verner Street. Ms. Gaines from the sports company rerouted my final payment to my credit union, as it should have been in the first place, and I received it at the end of the month, a number with more zeros than I could count.
I did what I have always done with good luck. I gave some of it away. I set up a fund at Tuscaloosa County High to buy uniforms, shoes, and pom poms for every girl who wants to cheer, and especially for the ones whose families cannot afford it. I named it the Hard Handle Fund, after the first design I ever made, and the first recipient, a quiet freshman named Imani, wrote me a letter in purple ink that I keep on my refrigerator. She said that she had never thought a person like her could be on the squad. I wrote back that she is exactly the kind.
On my seventy second birthday in March, the squad gathered in my backyard, twenty six girls this year, in their satin jackets, with a banner and a sheet cake. They sang. They shouted a cheer they had written, which rhymed Bonnie Sue with I love you, and Then Kaylee, grinning, handed me a pom pom. “Go on, Grandma,” she said. “Mostly.” So I kicked off my shoes and stood in the grass and, to the roar of twenty six girls, I did a cartwheel. Mostly. It was crooked. It was the best one I ever did.
