The Two Chairs at the Bench End

That morning, for no reason I could name, I had put his pencil in my purse. A yellow number two, sharpened with the pocketknife he carried, the eraser worn down to the metal. I had held it at the kitchen counter and thought, I am being silly, and then I put it in anyway.

Down on the floor, something was happening that I did not notice at first.

Brody Mathews and Evan Kline, the two senior captains, had stopped shooting. They were standing at the free throw line, both of them looking up at the top of the bleachers. Brody is six-foot-three and quiet, a farm kid from out past the grain elevator who spent three summers running irrigation pipe.

Evan is shorter and louder, the kind of boy who talks to the referees the entire game and somehow never gets a technical.

I watched Brody say something to Evan. I watched Evan look at my pillar. I watched them both turn, at the same moment, and look at the ticket table where Roland stood.

Then Brody jogged over to Coach Brandt. They talked for maybe ten seconds. Glenn Brandt is forty-six, a big man who played two years at Ball State and has coached the Cardinals for twelve.

I saw him glance across the gym at me, and then at the ticket table, and then at the floor. I saw him rub the back of his neck.

I saw him nod.

Evan went the other way, toward the equipment closet under the far basket. He came back dragging a gray metal folding chair in each hand, and the legs scraped on the hardwood loud enough that I heard it from row eighteen, even over the band.

I sat very still.

Brody took one chair from him. They carried them down the sideline together, past the cheerleaders, past the water coolers, past the row of boys in warm-up shirts, all the way to the far end of our bench by the scorer’s table. They set the two chairs side by side, a few inches apart, facing the court.

They did not say anything to anyone. They just set them down, and Evan straightened them with his foot so the legs lined up.

Then Evan looked up. Eighteen rows. He found me behind the pillar, and he pointed.

The band stopped in the middle of a bar. I remember that clearly. A trombone slid off its note and quit, and for a half second the only sound in the gym was one lonely tuba finishing a phrase nobody was listening to.

Coach Brandt came across the floor to the foot of the bleachers. He put one hand up in the air and waved me down like a man bringing in an airplane. And he used the voice he uses at the end of a close game, the one that carries to the last row of the bleachers.

“Karen!” he called. “Come on down. We saved you a seat!”

Eight hundred heads turned.

At the ticket table, Roland’s pen stopped moving.

I picked up my purse. I stood up. My knees did not feel like my own. A woman in the next row, somebody’s grandmother in a red cardigan, moved her knees sideways to let me pass without saying a word, and as I went by she touched my elbow.