The Note I Showed Her in the Bleachers

Cold Aluminum

The home bleachers at our county high bite through your jeans the second you sit down. Cold aluminum that never warms up, no matter how many bodies pack onto it.

I climbed to the top row where she always sat. Then I eased down beside her like I had every right in the world to be there.

Tammy did not know me from Adam. She scooted over a few inches to make room, the way you do for a stranger at a ballgame, and kept her eyes on the field.

I had a Frito pie going cold in my lap. In my coat pocket was a folded piece of notebook paper, and the stadium lights were bright enough to read by.

The band was warming up down on the track. The whole place smelled like diesel off the generator and chili out of the concession stand.

I was fifty-two years old and I had never done a bold thing in my life. I was the woman who let the clerk keep the extra dime rather than point it out.

But I had come up those steps with a purpose. For once, my hands were steady.

“Cold one tonight,” I said.

“Always is up here.” She smiled at me, friendly as anything. “You with the home side, or you got a kid on the visitor bus?”

“Home side,” I said. “I came to see about something, actually. I believe we know some of the same people.”

She laughed a little, still not looking hard at me. Down on the field the ref blew the whistle and the kick went up and the crowd stood.

I waited for them to sit back down before I said the next part. You learn patience at fifty-two. You learn that the hard words keep.

Below us the student section was already hoarse, a wall of them in white T-shirts and face paint. The Eagles were our pride out here, the one thing the whole county agreed on.

I had sat in these same bleachers as a girl. My own daddy worked the chain gang on the sidelines for twenty years, moving the markers, never missing a home game.

So I knew this place in my bones. I knew the cold of the metal and the roar of the crowd and the way a lie sounds smaller against all that noise.