The Fourteen Steps to Row Nine

What Bev Remembered

On Monday I drove to the ticket office, a low brick building on the south side of the stadium with a row of windows and a bell on the door. I had no plan. I only knew one person at that university who called my father by his first name.

Bev Tuttle has worked the ticket window for thirty-one years. She wears her reading glasses on a beaded chain her granddaughter made her, and every October my father drove in with a pan of rhubarb bars from the freezer, set it on her counter, and said it was for the staff. Bev would have a bar in her mouth before he got back to the truck.

She saw me come in and took her glasses off the chain and held them in her hand, and I knew she had been waiting for somebody.

“Renee,” she said. “Come around to the side.”

In the little back office, with the filing cabinets and the space heater, she slid one sheet across the desk. At the top it said Immediate Family Account Transfer. Underneath were three marks. Lonnie’s signature. Bev’s initials. And my father’s.

I have seen that signature ten thousand times, on birthday cards and report cards and the back of a check for my first car. It was a tall careful hand with a loop on the G like a man lassoing something. The signature on that page was a scrawl that wandered downhill. The G had no loop at all. It looked like a man signing on a moving bus.

“I knew it looked wrong,” Bev said. “I’m going to say that plain, because I have said it to myself every night since August.”

“Then why did you process it?”

“Because it was inside the rules.” She shook her head. “Immediate family can take over an account once. Your brother brought it in signed, with his own driver’s license. The reason box says account holder unable to travel, which is true. I asked did his dad know, and he said it was Dad’s idea. I stamped it. And that night I lay awake, because Gordy Haverkamp has set a pan of rhubarb bars on my counter every fall for thirty years and not once has he signed anything that looked like that.”

“Can it be undone?”

“Only by the account holder. Which as of August is your brother.” She said it gently. “He’d have to come in and sign it back, and your father would have to sign too. Nobody in this building can do it for you, and I wish I could say different.”

Then she opened the desk drawer.

On top of a stack of pens lay one blank transfer form, creased down the middle where it had been folded and unfolded.

“I printed this in September,” Bev said. “I didn’t know who for. I just thought, if somebody ever asks what to do, I want to have the paper ready.” She tapped the corner. “I can’t tell you what to do about your brother, honey. But I’ll tell you what thirty-one years at this window taught me. Those seats don’t belong to the account. They belong to whoever has sat in them long enough that everybody around them would feel the empty chair.”

“Who sits around them?”

She looked at me over the place where her glasses should have been.

“You know who,” she said. “Call Phyllis.”