The Two Chairs at the Bench End

The gym was already roaring when I came through the east doors, and the sound hit me the way it does every March in Dunmore, Indiana. Eight hundred people packed into a building meant for six hundred, the band blasting, shoes squeaking on the floor.

I did not need a ticket. I had never needed a ticket. For thirty-one years my husband Dale and I walked into this gym on sectional night, turned left, climbed three steps, and sat in Row C, Section B, seats five and six, right behind the home bench.

In Indiana, a sectional seat is not something you buy at the door. The school hosts the tournament, the booster club sells reserved seat cards for the whole run, and those cards pass down in a family the way a farm does. Dale’s father held those two seats before him. Nobody asked who sat there. It was simply known.

So I walked to Row C with my red seat cushion under my arm, the one I sewed the winter Tobin was born, and I stopped at the third step. A man I had never seen before was sitting in seat five.

He wore a new puffer vest the color of a traffic cone. His wife sat in seat six with her purse on my cushion.

Not a cushion like mine. Mine. I had left it under the seat after last year’s final, and nobody had cleaned the gym out in the meantime. Her purse sat in the exact dent my own weight had made over thirty-one years.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” the man asked. He said it kindly. That was the worst part. He had the voice of someone who truly believed he was being helpful.

“Those are my husband’s seats,” I said. I heard how small it sounded.

His face changed slowly, like a man who has just remembered the stove is on. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no. I’m Neal Preston. We moved over from Wabash in August. Roland Vickers sold us the cards Saturday. He said they came open.”

“They came open,” I said.

“That’s what he told us.”

Roland Vickers is my brother-in-law. He is Dale’s younger brother by six years, and he has been president of the Dunmore Cardinal Boosters for four years.

He had called me Sunday night, and I want to tell you about that call, because the call is the reason I was standing on the third step with a cushion under my arm and a stranger’s wife looking at me with her mouth open.

“Karen,” he said, “the booster club needed cash. It’s done. But I need you to hear me out before you get upset.”

When a man opens like that, you are already upset. I sat down on the edge of the bed with the phone and said, “Go ahead.”

“The booster account is in rough shape. We have a bus bill from the regional that’s eighteen hundred and sixty dollars, the dryer in the locker room died in January, and we had two hundred and twelve dollars in checking on Friday. Two hundred and twelve, Karen.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said, and I meant it. I am a teller at First Farmers Bank. I see what small town accounts look like. I know how two hundred and twelve dollars feels when the bus company is sending letters.