The Fourteen Steps to Row Nine

“The steps up to Row 9 are fourteen,” he said. “Seven and a half inches each. A man in a chair, with the chair, is about two hundred pounds.” He looked around the table, and I watched every face change, one after another, like lights coming up. “That’s not a stairs problem,” Gene said. “That’s a staffing problem.”

Nobody laughed. But Ed said softly, “I carried the whole high school band down those steps in 1991 during a tornado warning.”

“You did not,” said Dolores.

“I carried the tuba section.”

That was the plan, and it took the table under an hour to build, which is what happens when eleven people have been thinking the same thing for weeks and nobody had a place to set it down. Nobody would confront Lonnie or speak of him. Nobody would tell my father a word about the seats, because I asked, and they all said yes, even Ed. We would be kind to anybody who sat where my father belonged. And on the day of the rivalry game, if Dad still wanted to go, the whole street would take him up those fourteen steps.

“Where does he sit?” Pete Anders asked.

“Ours,” Phyllis said. “Five and six. Roy and I will watch from the step.”

“Those are your seats.”

“Honey, I have been sitting in them since 1983,” said Phyllis. “I can stand for one game.”

Homecoming

I did not go to homecoming. That was the rule I made for myself. I could not sit in a section full of people being kind to strangers on my father’s behalf and keep my face still.

So I got it from Phyllis, on the phone, at nine o’clock that night.

The man from Omaha was Curt Nystrom, a fifty-three-year-old insurance man with a good coat and an easy way of talking. He had brought his father, Vern, eighty-one, who walked with a cane, and two teenage sons. They sat in Row 9, seats 1 through 4. Dad’s aisle. Dad’s spot.

Phyllis poured the four of them hot chocolate before the anthem. Then she told Curt Nystrom, in the voice she once used to tell second graders where the milk was, that she hoped he liked the seats. “They belong to a man named Gordy Haverkamp,” she said. “He painted the lines you’re about to watch. He’s eighty-one and can’t get up the stairs anymore, so his son has been kind enough to let other people use them.”

“He was polite,” she told me. “He said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ But the old fellow, Vern, he didn’t watch anything. He kept looking at the fifty.”

He called me Sunday. I suspect Phyllis of giving him my number. He said he had sat in my father’s seat the day before and wanted to say he was sorry. He had also paid a man named Lonnie fourteen hundred dollars for the rivalry game, and he had already written asking for it back.

“I’m not telling you so you’ll think better of me,” he said. “I’m telling you because my dad hasn’t said a word since we left the parking lot, and I think that is about the loudest he’s ever been.” He cleared his throat. “I’m mailing your father a card, too. It seemed the least a man could do.”

Lonnie called that night. My phone went off while I was washing dishes, and I knew who it was before I looked.

“You told them,” he said.

“I told eleven people who have sat beside Dad for forty years. They did the rest on their own.”

“The Omaha guy wants his fourteen hundred back.” His voice cracked, the way it does when he is very angry and very tired. “I don’t have fourteen hundred, Renee. It went on the truck note. It went on,” and then he stopped, and I heard him breathe. “You made me look like a thief in front of an entire section.”

“I never said a word to anybody about you, Lonnie, except what’s true.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“The seats are mine,” he said finally. “I’ll use them myself. I’ll take Rick. I’ll sit in every one, and nobody gets to tell me I can’t.”

“All right.”

“All right?”

“They’re your seats,” I said. “I’m not going to stop you from sitting in them.”

A long quiet. A television on his end, and a truck going by. Then he hung up.