Two Lawn Chairs at the Flagpole

I had already put two green lawn chairs in the back of my car, the old webbed kind with aluminum arms that we have had since I was in high school. Mom saw them and laughed.

“Those are your daddy’s chairs,” she said. “From the ball games.”

“They still hold,” I said.

“So do I,” she said, and got in.

The school is a long, low brick building at the edge of town, with a flagpole out front in the middle of a wide green lawn and a row of maples along the road just starting to turn orange.

We parked in the visitor spaces and walked in through the front doors at 11:45.

The office was full of grandparents, men in clean seed caps and women with their purses held in front of them, all of them signing the clipboard.

The secretary looked up and saw me, and then she saw Mom, and I watched her put it together. She did not say anything. She just handed Mom her visitor sticker and said, “Beautiful day for the lawn, ma’am.”

Mom pressed the sticker on her cardigan, right over her heart, and patted it flat. “It surely is,” she said.

From the office hallway you can see into the lunchroom through a long window in the wall, and I stopped there for just a second, because I could not help it.

There they were. Kendra was sitting at the end of the long table in a pretty sweater, her phone up in front of her, taking pictures. She would take one, look at it, frown, and take another.

Mason was beside her. He was eating his tray, chicken nuggets and green beans and a carton of chocolate milk, sitting up straight, answering whatever she asked him with a nod.

He looked fine. He looked like a polite boy having lunch with a polite grown-up.

But he did not lean toward her, not once, and every time she lifted the phone he held still like he was at the doctor.

Mom stood beside me and watched him for a long minute, and she did not say one word. Her hand came up and rested on my arm.

Then she said, quietly, “Let’s get set up, honey. He’ll be out before we know it.”

We carried the chairs out across the grass to the flagpole. The flag was snapping a little in the breeze, and the rope was knocking against the pole with that hollow ringing sound I remember from my own school days.

I unfolded the chairs side by side on the grass, facing the lawn with the school at our backs and the flagpole just to Mom’s right. Mom sat down in the first one and held the pie tin in both hands.

She had lined it with a clean towel and stacked the pies in neat rows, each one folded in a half moon, the edges crimped with a fork the way her mother did it, sugar sprinkled across the tops.