The Two Chairs at the Bench End

I drew the little diagram of the court, the way Dale did, the key and the three-point arc and the half-court line, and I wrote the date at the top and Tipton Valley, and under that, Cardinals, and I made my hand stop shaking by pressing the pencil into the paper.

The Cardinals won the tip.

In the second quarter, Tobin came in.

He went to the scorer’s table, checked in, and ran out onto the floor with his eyes straight ahead. He played four minutes. He took one shot, a three from the left corner, and the ball went up in a flat arc, and I held the pencil above the page, not breathing.

It dropped. Clean. No rim.

I circled it. And I looked up, and my son was jogging back on defense with a look on his face I have only seen a handful of times in his life. Not a smile.

Something harder than a smile. At the next dead ball, he glanced toward the end of the bench. Not at me. At the chair next to mine, the second one, the empty one.

He looked at it for a second. Then he looked away.

Two minutes later, with Dunmore up 29 to 26 at the half, the horn sounded, and the teams jogged off toward the locker rooms. The band started up again. Eight hundred people stood to stretch.

That was when Roland stood up from the ticket table.

He had a hand in his jacket pocket. He did not look at the boosters sitting near him, who were all watching him. He did not look at the principal, who had come down to stand near the scorer’s table with his arms folded. He walked straight out onto the hardwood, his dress shoes loud on the floor, toward me.

I put down Dale’s pencil.

He stopped about four feet from my chair. Roland has Dale’s build, only thicker, and Dale’s way of standing with his weight on one leg. For a moment all I could see was my husband’s shape wearing a red blazer and a face I could not read.

“Karen,” he said.

“Roland.”

He pulled his hand out of his pocket. He was holding two stiff white cards, each about the size of a playing card, each stamped in red ink, each with a number printed across the top. Section B, Row C, Seat 5. Section B, Row C, Seat 6.

Behind him the whole gym had gone quiet again. I could hear the refrigerator hum from the concession stand.

“I have to say something,” Roland said. His voice broke on the first word. “And I’d like to say it where everybody can hear, because I did it where everybody could see.”

He turned halfway around, to face the bleachers.

“Last weekend,” he said, loudly, “I sold two seats that were not mine to sell. They belonged to my brother Dale. He sat in them thirty-one years. He kept our team’s book from those seats longer than most of you have lived in this town.

And I sold them to pay a bus bill, because I did not want to stand up at a meeting and say we were broke.”

Nobody moved.

“That’s all of it. That’s the whole reason. It’s not a good one.”

He turned back and held the cards out to me, both at once, in two hands.

“These are yours, Karen. They always were. I’m sorry.”