The Two Chairs at the Bench End

I will tell you the truth. I thought about leaving. I thought about going out the east doors and sitting in the Buick and driving home to a quiet house. But Tobin was warming up, and I had told him on the drive over that I would be there. So I climbed.

Row eighteen. The very top, by the cinderblock wall, behind a pillar that blocks half the court. It is where the freshman girls sit with their phones, and where nobody has ever been able to see anything. I sat on my red cushion and held my purse on my lap with both hands.

From up there the whole gym looked like a painting of itself. The red and white, the long hardwood, the floor Dale had watched get refinished twice. At the far end the Tipton Valley team ran their layup line in blue.

At our end the Cardinals came out one by one, and my son came out fourth, number fourteen, shoulders squared the way he squares them when he is nervous.

He glanced up. He found me in about two seconds, because he always does. I watched his face go through three or four things at once, and then he looked down at his shoes and stayed that way.

I knew why. He had gone to his uncle’s house Sunday night after the call, and I only learned it later from his own mouth. He had stood in Roland’s driveway and begged him to take it back. “Those are Dad’s seats,” he had said.

And Roland had put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s handled, bud.” Sixteen years old, and he had walked home knowing it was not handled and not knowing what else to do.

So there was my boy at the free throw line stretching his quad with his eyes on the floor, and there was his mother eighteen rows up behind a post, and there was the pencil in my purse.

I should explain the pencil.

Dale kept the book. Not the official book. The school pays two people to sit at the scorer’s table and keep that, and they do it well. Dale kept ours: a green spiral shot chart, a little diagram of the court on every page, a tick mark for every shot Dunmore took and a circle if it went in.

He kept it from Row C, because from Row C you could see the bench and the clock and the arc of every shot without a pillar in the way. Thirty-one years of Cardinal basketball, in pencil, in green notebooks, on a shelf in the basement behind the furnace.

Coach Brandt told him once it was the most useful thing any fan had ever done for the program. “I can see where we shoot,” he said. “I can see where we get lazy.” Dale never said a word about it. He just brought the book.

He taught Tobin to keep it when Tobin was eight. I used to find the two of them in Row C at the junior high games, heads bent over the same page, Dale whispering, “Now watch the left corner, see, he’s cold there.” After Dale died, Tobin never touched the book again.

I found the last notebook still in Dale’s coat pocket in the closet that April. I carried it in my purse for a week, and then I put it back in the pocket and shut the door.