The gravel in the ballpark lot off Nashville Road still crunches the exact same way it did back in nineteen-eighty-four when I was nine years old and thought my dad owned the whole county just because he had a yellow reflective vest and a heavy-duty flashlight.

Ottis spent thirty-one years on that asphalt. He parked every Buick, station wagon, and pickup truck that rolled through the gates for three decades, and everybody in town knew him as the steady, quiet guy who waved you into your spot without ever making a fuss.

I figured he just didn’t care about baseball. That was the easiest story to tell myself when I was a kid growing up in a house where the hot water heater always seemed to be leaking and my shoes always had cardboard cut to fit the soles by November.

When he passed away last October after a quick three weeks in the county hospital, it fell to me to clear out the closet in the back bedroom. That is where I found the shoebox. It was taped shut with old yellow masking tape, my name scrawled across the lid in his neat, slow handwriting.

Inside were thirty-one ticket stubs. Every single one of them was for an opening day game, going all the way back to nineteen-seventy-four. None of them had been torn at the gate.

Right on top was a note folded into quarters. It said simply, These were always yours, son. I just never found the right day.

I sat down right there on the edge of his narrow bed with the box between my knees and tried to remember a single time he had ever complained about standing out in that parking lot for twelve hours straight. He never did. He just came home smelling of exhaust and stale popcorn, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and sat down at the formica table to check the figures in his little black ledger.

When I was about ten, I asked him straight out while he was lacing up his work boots why we never went inside to watch the guys actually play the game. He stopped with the laces half pulled, crouched down until his eyes were level with mine, and I still remember the sharp pop in his knees that made him wince.

Somebody’s got to watch the cars, buddy, he told me, keeping his voice real level.

Can’t have folks worrying about their cars while they are trying to enjoy themselves.

I nodded and went back to my cereal. Kids are good at swallowing whatever explanation adults hand them because the alternative means looking too closely at what things cost.

What I know now, and what took me fifty years to figure out, is that a pair of opening day tickets back then cost about what he made in three solid nights of standing out in the rain directing traffic. And he was buying them anyway. Every single spring without fail.

I found the folded receipts tucked underneath the stubs in that box. Two tickets, section one hundred fourteen, row eight, every year from the seventies through the two-thousands. And every year, something happened right before the first pitch that chewed up the money we were supposed to spend on hot dogs and sodas.

In nineteen-eighty-one it was my mother’s gallbladder surgery. In eighty-six it was my railroad tracks braces that made me lisp for a whole semester.

In ninety-one it was the transmission dropping clean out of the old Fairmont half a mile past the grain elevator.

In nineteen-nine-nine the tire plant where he worked days laid off a third of the floor, and he spent four months driving a delivery van for a dry cleaner in Scottsville just to keep us from losing the house.

There was always a reason the money had to go somewhere else. A dental bill, a new alternator, my first month’s rent on a studio apartment in Louisville when I swore up and down I could make it on my own and then promptly ran out of grocery money by the second week.

He never threw a single ticket away. He just tucked them into the shoebox, taped the lid back down with that old yellow tape, and went back out to buy two more the next March like a man who genuinely believed his luck was about to turn around.

The stub from nineteen-eighty-eight has a faint brown coffee ring right across the team logo. I stared at that ring for a long time, picturing him standing by the ticket window during his thirty-minute lunch break, paying cash he could ill afford, and then walking back to the asphalt lot to wave another station wagon into a tight slot.

There was one more thing at the very bottom of the box. A single ticket that wasn’t from an opener. It was dated just three weeks before he went into the hospital. Section one hundred fourteen, row eight.

He had circled the date in red ink on his pocket calendar by the telephone, right next to the number for the pharmacy and the local oil change place. He had finally bought the day. He just ran out of time to spend it with me.

I drove out to the stadium last Tuesday afternoon before the evening shift started. The lot was half empty, just a few delivery vans and a couple of salesmen’s sedans parked near the chain-link fence.

I walked right up to section one hundred fourteen, climbed the concrete steps, and sat down on row eight with both tickets clutched in my damp palm while the wind kicked up off the river and rattled the empty metal bleachers.

I pulled out the sealed envelope that had been wedged beneath the very last stub in the box. It was thicker than the others, held shut with a dab of red wax he must have bought at the stationery store down on Main Street. On the front, written in that careful, schoolteacher print he always used, were three words.

FOR OPENING DAY.

My hands were shaking a little bit as I broke the wax and slid the contents out into my lap. There was a handwritten letter on lined yellow tablet paper, every line straight and clean even though his hands had started trembling the last couple of winters.

He wrote about how proud he was that I had made something of myself at the warehouse, and how he was sorry we never made it past the parking lot gates together. He said he kept buying the tickets because dreaming about sitting next to me for nine innings was what got him through the twelve-hour shifts on the hot asphalt.

And tucked behind the letter, folded neatly inside a crisp bank envelope, was four hundred and eighty dollars in fifty-dollar bills, along with a cashier’s check made out in my name for the exact cost of two full-season ticket packages for the upcoming year.

Take your own boys, the last line of the letter said. I paid for the parking, too.

I sat there on those cold concrete steps for a long time while the sun dropped behind the floodwalls and the evening lot attendant started setting out the orange cones by the gate. I haven’t quite figured out how to tell my kids yet, but I know what I’m doing next April.