Kendra looked at the tin. Then at him. Then she uncrossed her arms and took one of the halves, and she held it in her hand like she did not know what it was.
“Thank you, Mason,” she said. Her voice cracked right in the middle of his name.
“You’re welcome,” he said. Then he turned to Mom. “Grandma, can Kendra sit in the other chair? Mama’s not using it.”
Mom looked at me. I nodded.
“Of course she can,” Mom said. “That’s what it’s there for. Sit down, Kendra. Those are my husband’s ball game chairs. They’ve held bigger people than you.”
Kendra sat down in the green chair beside my mother, on the lawn in front of the school, with a half of a fried pie in her hand and half the third grade watching her.
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For a minute nobody said anything. Mason sat back down in the grass between them. The children started drifting away to the swings, now that the pies were gone.
Kendra took a bite. She chewed it slowly, and then she put her hand over her mouth, and I saw her shoulders go.
“I’m sorry,” she said, through her fingers. She was looking at Mom, not me. “Ione, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you. I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
Mom did not say it was all right. She did not say anything for a moment. She just reached over and put her hand on Kendra’s knee, and left it there.
“He’s never once picked me,” Kendra said. Her voice was low so Mason would not hear, but he was right there and I am sure he did. “Not once in a whole year. I do everything. I thought if I had the seat, and the picture, then at least it would be in the newsletter that somebody picked me.”
That was her reason. I believe it was the whole of it. It was not a good reason, and it did not make what she did right.
You do not take an old woman’s seat because you are lonely. But it was a human reason, and I understood it, sitting there.
“Honey,” Mom said, very gently, “you can’t take a child’s heart by signing a clipboard. You just have to keep showing up. Year after year. Till one day you look up and he runs.”
Kendra nodded, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, and did not answer.
The principal came out of the front doors right about then with the school camera around his neck.
He is a big, friendly man named Wade who coached Little League for years, and everybody in town just calls him Wade.
He had been taking pictures of the Grandparents Day lunch all hour, for the newsletter. He walked across the lawn toward the flagpole, smiling, and stopped in front of us.