The Two Chairs at the Bench End

I know the score because I wrote it in the book, in Dale’s style, the final number circled twice. When the horn sounded, eight hundred people were on their feet, and Evan Kline was running laps around the free throw line with his jersey over his head.

Brody picked up Tobin and turned him in a circle. The band played the fight song for the third time and the tuba player was crying.

The boys lined up and shook hands with Tipton Valley. Then they came down the line toward our bench and one by one, as they passed, they each touched the corner of my chair. Not me. The chair. The gray metal back. Fifteen boys, a tap on the metal, a nod. Nobody had asked them to do it.

Tobin was last. He did not tap the chair. He sat in it.

“Mom,” he said.

“Yes.”

He took the pencil out of my hand. Not roughly. Just slowly, the way you take a thing you have been afraid to touch. He held it a moment, looked at the chewed eraser and the worn point, and turned it over.

“I’m sorry I stopped,” he said. “I didn’t know how to do it without him.”

“I know.”

“I think I could do the Tuesday games. If you did the Fridays. And maybe the sectionals, we could do it both.”

“Sit down next to me,” I said, because he already was.

He opened the book to a fresh page and drew the little court. I watched his hands do it. They were Dale’s hands, the same square nails, the same way of pressing the pencil so hard the page showed the mark on the next sheet.

When he finished, he wrote the date in the top corner, and under it, in block capitals, the letters T.V.

Tobin Vickers. Two initials, no more, his father’s way.

“Next game’s Friday,” he said.

“Friday,” I said.

Later that night, when the gym had mostly emptied and the janitor was sweeping the floor in long lines, Roland came and found me where I was waiting by the east doors for Tobin to come out of the locker room.

He had his blazer folded over his arm. Without it he looked like a man who had been awake for a week.

“Karen.”

“Roland.”

“I called the board this afternoon,” he said. “Before the game. I told them I’m done as president. Not because anyone asked. Because I’d have done it again, I think. Maybe not those seats.

But something. I would have found another person who wouldn’t push back.” He laughed, one short breath. “You were supposed to be that person. You were supposed to be easy.”

“I know I was.”

“Roland,” I said, “your brother did not leave much. A house, a truck, a stack of green notebooks, and a seat. You took the one thing that was not for sale, and you called it a bus bill.”

He took it. He stood there and took it, the way a man should.

“The bus gets paid Monday,” he said. “Nadine counted the tub. It came to two thousand three hundred and twelve dollars. That’s enough for the bus and the dryer both, with some left over for the spring.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t have raised that in a year. I never asked anybody. I thought if I asked, they’d see I’d failed.”

“They’d have given it to you in a night,” I said. “They would have given it to Dale.”