The Seat I Saved Every Saturday

The second season

His unit was supposed to come home at the end of October. It was written in pencil on the kitchen calendar. In May, the date moved to the middle of December. In July, it moved again. By the time the second season started, we were hearing Christmas at the earliest, and maybe after New Year’s, and no one would put anything in writing.

In August, the Rams started the second season with Coach Spiker’s twenty-third year at the whistle. We beat Wolfe Valley that time, which settled something.

Josh and Hannah Brill were in their lawn chairs on the track. The baby was walking by then. He came down the row to the coat on legs like a little drunk, put both hands on it, and said a word that might have been “hi.”

Kenny Mast, who works the gate, had offered back in the first season to lock the coat in the press box closet, and I had told him no. Now he did something else. Whenever it rained, he would come up the steps before the game with a clear plastic poncho and drape it over the coat, and take it off when the sun came out. He never said a word about it.

The Rams got better. A junior named Parsons, the tight end I had said was no Mattingly, caught a touchdown against Fisher Creek, and afterward he came and found me by the fence and said, “Mr. Mattingly, I just wanted to say. When Nate gets back. Tell him I’m keeping it warm for him.”

“Keeping what warm?” I said.

“The position,” he said. “Not the seat. I know that one’s yours.”

Through all of it, I kept pouring the second cup.

By the last week of the season the word was that they would not be home before Christmas. That meant the tenth game, the last one at home, would be one more empty Saturday, and after it a long winter with nothing to save a seat for.

I told myself I could do it one more time. Then the season would be over, and I would have to carry it differently.

Friday night

The unit did not come home in December. The Army brought them home nearly two months early, and nobody told the families, because nobody was sure until the last minute that the flights would hold.

Nate found out on a Tuesday. He called his mother, not me, and said he would land in Columbus on Friday night at ten-forty.

Then he said this to my wife, and she did an impression of his voice later that made the whole kitchen laugh.

“Mom, do not tell Dad. He’ll tell the whole Boosters club, and he’ll tell the guy at the feed store, and he’ll tell a man at the bank, and by Friday every living person in Washington County will be sitting at the airport with a banner.”

She said, “I won’t.”

“Mom.”

“I won’t tell him, Nate.”

She did not tell me. For three days she cooked my meals and sat beside me in front of the television with that boy’s secret in her pocket. In thirty-nine years of marriage I have never once caught Arlene Mattingly in a lie, and I did not catch her then.

On Thursday she told me that her sister Bev, in Zanesville, was home from the hospital and had no one with her for the weekend. That was true. It just was not why she was going.

She packed a bag Friday afternoon and had it by the door when I came in from the garage.

It was a nice bag. Navy blue, with a leather handle, the kind you see in a catalog. I had never seen it before. She said she had bought it for the trip, and I said, “For Zanesville?” and she said, “For anywhere.” She kissed me on the cheek, quick and hard, and held onto my sleeve a second. Then she was out the door, and I watched her back out of the driveway and thought my wife was worried about her sister. That was all I thought.

At ten-forty that night, I am told, a plane came down on a runway in Columbus, and a line of young people in camouflage came down the jet bridge into a terminal that was almost empty. A woman in a gray coat and a navy blue overnight bag was standing at the end of it, alone, and she was already crying before they reached her.

She told me later she dropped the bag.

They drove to Zanesville that night, and at one in the morning my son ate a ham sandwich at my sister-in-law’s kitchen table with both hands. I knew none of it. I was asleep by ten.