“Irene Pruitt,” she said, still holding my hand in both of hers. “My husband was Walter Pruitt. He worked beside Norbert at the mill for ten years.” She pointed at the gold G on her ring. “Walter wore the twin of this one. He wanted season tickets more than anything. He used to say that one day he would take me to every game and we would sit on the forty yard line like royalty.” The crowd rose for the kickoff, and she had to lean close to my ear. “He never got the chance, Bev. He was lost in an accident at the mill in 1980. Norbert was there.”
I sat down in Seat 7, because my knees decided for me. Irene told it plainly. That February morning Norbert and Walter had traded shifts so Walter could take Irene to a doctor appointment. The machine that failed was the one Walter would have been tending. Norbert never forgave himself. He did not tell me because he did not want me to look at him the way he looked at himself. “That spring he came to my kitchen with an envelope,” Irene said. “He said, Walter promised you the stadium, and I am going to keep that promise.”
“Every game for forty four years,” I said slowly. “He drove two hours just to sit next to you.” “And talk about Walter,” Irene said. “Mostly he talked about you. He said Bev can find a missing dollar in a payroll of nine hundred people. He said Bev never asks for anything, so I never knew what to give her.” She took a folded paper from her coat. “He gave me this in January. He said, when she comes, and not before, you hand it over.” My name was on the front in the square capital letters of a millwright.
A letter in the hand of a millwright, a stranger with a matching ring and forty four years of kept promises gave one widow a seat at Lambeau Field and a friend for life.
The letter was short. He wrote that he had loved me every day and was bad at saying it, so he had decided to say it with a stadium instead. The secret account, he said, was not a secret from me but for me. Every year he had put the cost of the seat of Walter and mine aside, and a little extra, so that when he was gone the tickets would stay paid for ten years. “Sit where I sat,” he wrote. “Let Irene tell you the rest. And Bev, I should have brought you in 1980. I was afraid you would see the guilt on me. You would have forgiven me anyway.”
I read it twice, the way I read everything. Then the whole stadium stood up and roared, and I realized I was crying in a sea of green and gold, and nobody minded one bit. Irene passed me a paper napkin with a cheese curd stain on it. “He was a stubborn man,” she said. “I know,” I said. “He was a good one.” A man in the row behind us leaned forward and asked if we would like a bratwurst. I said yes, because I had never eaten one at Lambeau Field, and Norbert would have laughed himself silly to see it.
By the end of the third quarter I understood the rules, mostly. By the fourth I was yelling at the referees with a woman I had known for ninety minutes. The Packers won by a field goal. Afterward Irene walked me out to the lot, and we sat on the open tailgate of my Buick with the sky going pink over the stadium. “Walter would have liked you,” she said. “He liked anyone who yelled at referees.” I told her my kitchen had a spare room and a very good pot roast, and she said she would bring the pie.
At home I called Mike and told him everything. He was quiet on the phone for so long that I thought the line had dropped. “Dad kept a promise for forty four years,” he finally said, “and never once told us what it cost him.” Then he asked whether the second seat could be his. I said it could, and that he would share it with his sister and her children, and that the gold G ring would stay with Irene, where it belonged. We found the bank account the next week. The balance in it covered the seats for years to come.
The first thing I did with the extra money was buy a pair of green wool yarn skeins. I knit through October, at the kitchen table, with the radio on the games Norbert had listened to in the garage. In November I finished two scarves, one for Irene to replace the worn out one from 1983, and one for me. I wrapped them in tissue paper and brought them to her porch on a cold Sunday morning. She put hers on right there in the doorway, laughing, and wore it all the way to the car.
Mike met us in the parking lot on the following Sunday, and I introduced him to Irene as if she were a cousin from Kaukauna. He studied her ring, then her face, and then he hugged her hard. “You are the reason he came home smiling,” he said. Irene shook her head and said Norbert had come home smiling because of the pot roast waiting for him. I had never once thought of that. Forty four years of Sundays, and the smell of my kitchen had been the other half of his Packers day. It was not nothing. It was a whole marriage.
We have not missed a home game since. Irene takes Seat 8 and I take Seat 7, with Mike on the aisle, and an empty cup of coffee sits on the armrest between us on the cold days. At the end of every game, when the whole stadium sings, I lean over, say it out loud and finally mean it. Norbert would have grinned. I tell him go Pack, I tell him I love him, and in the wind off the field the end of my old green scarf waves back.