The Seat I Saved Every Saturday

Down the track in front of us, a baby in a knit cap with ears stood up in his lawn chair and pointed at my son with his whole fist.

When we let go of each other, Orville Wendt was looking up at us from his spot with both hands on his cane.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Nate. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Sit down. You’re blocking the view.”

Then he put out a hand, an old man’s hand with the knuckles gone big, and Nate took it. They held on a long time, the way you hold a post to see if it’s set.

I looked back at the aisle, and the coat was still lying there where it had been for ten Saturdays, a little rumpled now from my hand.

Nate looked at it, too.

He did not say anything about it. He bent and picked it up in both hands, slowly, the way you would pick up a sleeping child, and he held it against his chest. He pressed his face into the collar for a second.

“It smells like the hall closet,” he said, muffled.

“Your mother washes it twice a year.”

“It smells like you,” he said.

I had no answer for that.

He sat down in his seat, on the aisle in row seven, with the coat across his knees. Not on the bench. In his lap. And I sat down next to him, and Orville on my other side, and the three of us looked at the field as if nothing had happened.

On the field the Rams had the ball. Somebody fumbled.

Behind us, at the top of the steps, I heard a sound like a person trying not to make a sound. I turned and looked back.

It was Arlene.

She had come in through the top gate and stood at the head of the aisle in her gray coat, with a paper bowl of chili in her hands. I do not know where she got the chili. She had one hand over her mouth, and the tears were running down her face and dripping off her chin into the bowl, and she was not trying to stop them.

She had decided in a parking lot fourteen months earlier that she would not cry in front of the soldiers.

I think that rule had expired.

She came down the steps with the chili held out in front of her like an offering. She sat on the other side of Nate, the first time she had sat in row seven since game two, and she put the bowl in his hands and her head on his shoulder, and she did not say a word.

Nate took a bite of the chili. He closed his eyes.

“Mom,” he said, “I have thought about this chili for a year.”

“I know,” said Arlene. “I could tell by your emails.”

That was the only thing anybody said for a while.