The Two Chairs at the Bench End

Down the bench, Brody had already taken the second one.

Then I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I looked up, and four old men in feed caps and Carhartt vests were standing in a line behind my chair. I know them all. They sit in Row B, in the seats their fathers sat in.

Elmer Whitaker, Bud Haas, Stewart Dockery, and a retired mail carrier named Art Lunde, who has never spoken a word to me in thirty years that was not about the weather.

“Mrs. Vickers,” said Elmer. He is eighty-one. “We heard you were short a pencil.”

He held out a yellow number two, sharpened to a point. Then Bud handed me one. Then Stewart. Then Art. Four pencils, side by side in my hand with Dale’s, a little bundle of yellow wood.

“A man ought to have a spare,” Art said gruffly.

I could not answer. I held the pencils and I laughed, and it came out wet, and Nadine’s sandwich fell off my knee onto the floor and nobody cared at all.

The second half started at 8:14. I know because I wrote it at the top of the page.

Dale would have called the second half lousy and beautiful. Tipton Valley came back in the third quarter on seven straight points, and our boys played as if they had left their legs in the locker room.

Coach Brandt called timeout with 4:11 left in the third, and I watched my son kneel with the other reserves and stare at the clipboard like it was written in a language he almost knew.

During that timeout, the second folding chair got occupied.

I did not hear him sit down. I only looked over and Tobin was in it, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the shot chart. Thirty seconds. Just the one timeout, because the starters were crowding the huddle and the reserves were made to give way.

“Mom,” he said. He did not look at me.

“Hi, buddy.”

He pointed with a finger at the page. At the left corner, where I had drawn a cluster of circles. “He’s cold there,” he said. “Tipton’s number twenty-two. They keep running him to the right, but he’s cold on the left.

Look.” His finger moved. “Three for eleven. You can’t see it from up there, but you can see it here. Dad always said that.”

“I know,” I said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“You should tell Coach.”

“You tell him.”

He looked at me then. My boy, sixteen years old, with his father’s eyes and his father’s habit of chewing the inside of his cheek when he is thinking. He looked at me for a long moment. He did not smile. But his face did the thing that I have only seen on him in dreams since the funeral.

Then he got up, walked to the huddle, and tapped the coach on the shoulder.

I do not know what he said. I saw Coach Brandt lean in. I saw him nod once, sharply, and then draw something on the clipboard and show it to the starters. And when the horn blew and the Cardinals went back onto the floor, they started overplaying number twenty-two to the left.

He did not make another shot in the third quarter.

Dunmore won it 58 to 55.