The Fourteen Steps to Row Nine

The Church Lot

“Dad can’t make the stairs anyway, Renee,” my brother said. “Somebody might as well get some use out of those seats.”

He said it in the gravel lot behind Ellery Lutheran, ten minutes after the benediction, with a foam cup of church basement coffee in one hand and his truck keys in the other. He said it the way a man reads the weather off his phone. Not sorry. Not even defensive yet. Just tired of me asking.

My husband, Mike, stood three feet off with his hands in his jacket pockets, watching the side of my brother’s face. Mike is six foot four and has never needed a second word for anybody. He was saving all of his words right then, and I could feel how many there were.

The Sunday before, Phyllis Ostrander had called me at seven in the morning. Phyllis has sat in Row 9, Section 14, for forty-one years, two seats down from my father, and she does not telephone anybody before eight unless somebody has died.

“Nobody’s dead, honey,” she said first. “But who are those men with the cooler in Gordy’s seats?”

I found out by asking my brother straight out in a church parking lot, which is where the Haverkamps have always settled things: out of earshot of the pastor, in plain sight of everybody else.

“Buyers,” Lonnie said. “I moved the account into my name in August. The good games go for real money, Renee. Homecoming alone, I got eleven hundred dollars for four seats. One Saturday afternoon. You know how many loads of gravel that is?”

“Those are Dad’s seats.”

“Dad’s seats sat empty all last year. He made one game and he was asleep by the second quarter. He’s eighty-one with a walker and a bad heart, and those seats are fourteen steps up from the tunnel.” He sipped the coffee and made a face at it. “Dad can’t make the stairs anyway.”

“Did he sign something?”

“He signed it,” Lonnie said.

I think I had known that already. I think that was the part that went in and stayed.

I want to say what I did not do, and why, because people have asked me since.

I did not yell. My brother is our father’s son, and a Haverkamp who gets yelled at digs in until the hole is deeper than the yeller is tall. I watched Dad and Lonnie not speak for most of 1998 over a borrowed post-hole digger. If I had raised my voice in that lot, those seats would have been sold in one lump to a stranger by suppertime, just to prove a point.

I did not call the sheriff. A deputy would have asked what I had just asked my brother: did he sign it? The answer was yes. There was a form, and no deputy on earth wants his Sunday spent deciding whether an old man understood what he put his pen to.

And I did not go to a lawyer, though I carried the idea around all afternoon like a hot dish I could not set down. To say Dad had been tricked, somebody would have to say it to Dad. Somebody would have to sit across from my father, who painted the lines on that field for thirty-three years and never asked anybody for a thing, and tell him his own son had slid a paper in front of him on a bad afternoon. I would have lost the seats ten times over first.

There was one more reason, and it was my mother’s. Carol died four years ago in March. In her last week she held my wrist with a hand that weighed nothing and said, “Keep the boys talking, Renee.” She meant the whole lopsided family. A promise to a woman on her way out is not a thing you get to renegotiate in a gravel lot.

Mike drove us home and said nothing for eleven miles. Then he said, “I could go have a word with him.”

“No. He is still going to be Dad’s son on Monday, Mike. And mine.”

He nodded slowly, the way he does when he has decided to respect a thing he disagrees with. Then he asked what I was going to do. I said I did not know yet, but I knew who to ask.