The Fourteen Steps to Row Nine

Phyllis’s Kitchen

Phyllis Ostrander is seventy-eight and ran the cafeteria at Ellery Elementary for thirty years. She can feed four hundred children in forty minutes, and she has never raised her voice in a room where she was in charge. She and her husband, Roy, live in a white farmhouse at the edge of town with a kitchen table that sits twelve.

When I came through the door on Wednesday night, ten people were sitting at it.

I had expected Phyllis and Roy. I had not expected a jury.

There was Roy, and his brother Arlen, eighty, who still drives a grain truck at harvest. Ed Kroeger, a retired mail carrier built like a refrigerator, who has Row 10 behind us. Pat and Dolores Wiebe from Row 8. A young couple, Josh and Kayla Hendrickson, in Row 10. Pete Anders, who runs the grounds crew now and learned to line a field from my father when he was nineteen. And in his blue usher’s vest, which he had not bothered to take off for supper, Gene Ruzicka, who has worked the top of the Section 14 stairs for thirty-eight years and once told a United States senator to move.

Bev Tuttle came in last, still in her coat, with a pan under foil. That made eleven.

I told them everything. The church lot, the form, the signature like a man on a bus, the number my brother had said out loud. Nobody interrupted. Roy pushed his plate away halfway through.

When I was done, Ed said, “I’ll go have a word with the boy.”

“No,” I said, and Phyllis said it at the same moment.

“No word,” Phyllis said. “Nobody says one word to Lonnie. That’s the first rule.” She put a hand on my arm. “Gordy hasn’t lost a thing yet. Those seats are still sitting there. They’ve just got the wrong people in them.”

“So we sit there and be polite to a man selling our friend’s seats?” Pat Wiebe said.

“We do what we’ve done every Saturday for forty years,” Phyllis said. “We’re neighbors. The fellow who pays eleven hundred dollars to sit in Row 9 didn’t know whose seats he bought. Some boy on a swap page told him they were available. He is a guest in my row on a cold Saturday, and I am going to bring him hot chocolate and tell him exactly where he is sitting. That’s all anybody does.”

Gene Ruzicka took a notepad from his vest.

“Homecoming’s the eighteenth,” he said. “Rivalry game’s November twenty-second. Your brother’s got that one listed at fourteen hundred.” He turned a page. “Here’s what I want to know, Renee. Does your father still want to go?”

“Every Saturday,” I said. “Ten o’clock. He asks.”

Gene nodded for a good while.