The Game
The wind came straight across the field Friday night. I wore my barn coat. I climbed the steps of the home bleachers to row eight, the way you climb when you’ve spent your life going up poles, holding the rail with a hand that does not need it.
She was sitting on a stadium cushion in a plum coat and a green knit hat with a small curl showing under the edge. She looked up. I had braced for the fact of fifty-five years. What I had not braced for was the same eyes, gray and a little wide-set and a little wary, like somebody who is about to be told a joke and is not sure it is on her.
“Marvene Varley,” I said. It came out of me like a cough. I did not mean to say the maiden name.
“Marvene Hartzell. I’m sorry about Joleen.”
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“I’m sorry about Rollin.”
I sat. We watched a football game I could not describe to you under oath, and in the third quarter, having run out of courage to keep silent, I told her about the hay rack. Gretchen had put me next to the Holmgren twins, I said, and I would be proud to sit by her instead. I would understand if the answer was no. I knew what it looked like in a town this size.
She did not answer right away. She had a look I now know. She was in two places at once, here on the cushion, and somewhere else, deciding.
“Ten o’clock,” she said. “I’ll bring the quilt.”
The Bobcats lost by two touchdowns. I do not think either of us noticed.
I walked her the four blocks to her house afterward, under the streetlights, and she did not ask me to take her arm, and I did not offer it. At her gate she said a thing that I think she did not mean to say. She said, “My son was at the house when you called.”
I said, “I thought I heard someone.”
“He’s forty-nine. He’s carried his father’s death like a sack of wet sand. Yesterday he said a thing to me in the hall.” She took a breath. “Dad’s not even two years gone, and you’re curling your hair for a boy from 1971.”
It was very dark by the gate. I was glad of it. I did not want her to see what that sentence did to my face.
“That’s a hard thing for a man to say to his mother,” I said.
“It was.”
“And he’s right about the two years,” I said. “It’s nineteen months. A man is allowed to count them. And I’d count them too if it were Joleen.” I stopped, because I had to. “He’s wrong about the rest. The boy from 1971 is alive because of a girl. I’d like to tell you what I mean by that someday. Not tonight, and not because I want anything for it.”
I saw her go still. She said, “Stan.”
“Not tonight,” I said, and I touched my cap to her like a fool from a western, and I went to my truck.
I had nearly said it. I had her at the gate in the dark with her hand on the latch and the words in my mouth, and I took them back. I could see how it would go: I would say, I know it was you, and she would say, I never asked for thanks, and from then on every kindness between us would carry a little ticket. I wanted her to put her hand in mine on a Saturday for no reason but that she wanted to.