The Two Chairs at the Bench End

“They gave it to you.”

“They gave it to a seat.”

He did not argue. He turned the blazer over once on his arm. “I’m going to stop by Sunday, if that’s all right. Not to talk about this. I’d just like to see Tobin’s book.”

“We’ll be home after church,” I said. “Bring something for the table. Not money.”

He nodded. And that was the whole conversation, and I did not forgive him that night and did not tell him I had, and I did not ask for a thing.

But I noticed that when he went out the east doors into the cold, he held the door for Neal Preston coming in, and the two of them stood there a moment, two men in the doorway with their breath showing, and shook hands.

Coach Brandt called me Thursday. The board had met Wednesday night and accepted Roland’s resignation, and on its first motion it voted without a single no. A held seat card in the Dunmore booster club could not be sold or reassigned unless the family gave it up in writing. Not by the president. Not by the board. By the family.

“They put Dale’s name in the minutes,” he said. “Row C, five and six, held by the Vickers family. Neal Preston seconded it.”

We won the semifinal that Friday, 61 to 54. Tobin and I kept the book together, sitting in the two gray chairs at the end of the bench. Evan hit five threes. Brody grabbed fourteen rebounds. The old men in Row B each brought their own pencil, in case.

We lost the final on Saturday, 63 to 62, on a shot at the buzzer from a boy in blue whom nobody had covered. I sat there and held the book and did not move for a long time.

Then Tobin wrote the final number at the bottom of the page, and underlined it, and under that he wrote a small L in the left margin.

“That’s how Dad marked it,” he said. “Where we were cold.”

“I know it,” I said. “He was always cold on the left.”

“Not him. The team.” He shut the book. “We’ll fix it next year.”

Later that night, I took the red seat cushion out of the car and carried it into the house. I set it on the shelf in the basement, behind the furnace, next to the thirty-one green notebooks and the final one, still in Dale’s coat pocket, which I had decided to leave where it was.

I put the notebook from that night beside them, with T.V. on the cover now next to D.V., two sets of initials in two hands, one of them still learning how to hold the pencil.

The next March, Row C had two people in it again. We came early. Roland carried the cushion in for me, which he had asked if he could do, and he sat one row back with his own seat card, a small white rectangle with a red number.

He did not speak, and I did not turn around, and halfway through the first quarter I felt a hand touch the back of my seat. Just once. Just briefly, the way you touch something to be sure it is still there.

Tobin leaned across me, pencil in hand, his eyes on the court.

“Left corner,” he said. “Watch the left corner.”

“I’m watching,” I said.

And I was.