The woman at the ticket office at Lambeau Field pulled the file of Ken from a drawer of cream colored folders and set it between us on the counter as if it were something warm. Her name tag read Ms. Brauer. She had the steady voice of a person who has delivered both good news and bad to ten thousand families and has learned to put them in the same envelope. “Mrs. Hendricks,” she said, “I believe you are going to want to sit down.”
The file was thinner than I expected. In 1971, the form said, the account for Section 117, Row 32, Seats 9 and 10 had been transferred from its original holder, a Mr. Walter Zeman of Allouez, to a young man named Kenneth Hendricks, aged eighteen. Under reason for transfer, in a spidery hand, someone had written: In gratitude. There was a signature and a small stub of paper clipped to the corner, brown with age. It was a ticket from the Ice Bowl, December 31, 1967. Seat 9. Row 32. Section 117.
For forty five years I had believed what my husband told me. His father had given him the seats, he always said, a gift for his graduation, and he would not hear another word on the subject. I had never questioned it. Now I understood why he changed the subject so quickly when I asked about the old man. Ken had kept a secret out of the shyness of a boy, or loyalty, or the simple habit of a man who never liked being thanked. I put my hand on the counter to steady myself.
The trouble was Mike. My son had told me over Sunday dinner that a cousin of his, a man who had once worked part time on the grounds crew, had heard that seats not passed down through direct family go back to the waiting list when the holder dies. Mike did not want to upset me. But he did not want me to renew the account for $1,800 only to find out in the fall that it was not mine. Ms. Brauer listened to all of this and then took a large book from the shelf. She read to me from the section on surviving spouses.
Kindness done quietly without a thought of payment is the one gift that always comes back around.
The rules, she said, were clear. When an account holder dies, the surviving spouse may assume the account, and the office records the transfer. The history of how the seats first came to Ken did not matter, so long as the transfer of 1971 was documented, and it was. It sat in the cream folder in her hand. The account was mine. It had been mine for a year and a half, since the day I walked in with a certificate of death, and no waiting list in the world could change it. I thanked her and my voice did not hold steady.
She did one more kind thing. Walter Zeman had died in 1994, she told me, but the office kept the address of the family, and his daughter Lorraine still lived in De Pere. I wrote to her that night in my best Palmer method hand. I said I was the wife of the boy who received the seats in 1971, and that I would like to know the old man. Four days later, a phone call came from a woman with a warm, tired voice who said she had been waiting forty years for someone to ask.
Lorraine lived in a little yellow house with an enormous cheesehead hat on the hall table. She poured coffee and brought out a shoebox. In it was a photograph of 1967: an old man in a wool coat, standing beside a skinny fourteen year old boy in an oversized cap, both of them grinning with frost on their eyebrows. “Dad had no sons,” Lorraine said. “Your husband shoveled our walk every winter from the time he was eleven. He never took a nickel. Dad took him to the Ice Bowl because no one else would.” She handed me a note.
It was in the hand of Mr. Zeman, dated 1971. When I am gone, it said, give the seats to the boy who shoveled my walk without being asked. He will sit in them like church. I read it and could not see the page. Lorraine held my hand. We cried together at her kitchen table like two women who had known each other for sixty years. She told me her own children did not care for football at all, and I told her that she was welcome in Seat 10 whenever she liked, and that I meant it.
In December, on a morning of iron cold with the flags standing straight out from the poles, Lorraine sat beside me in Section 117 with a wool blanket and a thermos. Marlene sat on the other side with her own thermos and a flask she did not mention. Mike came late and sat in the row behind with his hat pulled down. At the kickoff the whole bowl rose together, seventy thousand people breathing out clouds, and Lorraine put her hand on the cold plastic of Seat 9 and said, very softly, “Hello, Dad.”
Mike found me after the final whistle. He said he was sorry for doubting, and that he had talked to the cousin, who admitted he had misunderstood a rule about the waiting list. I told him there was nothing to forgive. He had asked a hard question out of love, and the answer had been waiting in a cream folder for fifty years. He hugged me, a real hug, and then he said, awkwardly, “Mom, would you mind if I used Seat 10 sometime, with the kids?”
I framed the stub of the Ice Bowl and hung it in the front hall under the picture of Ken with his thermos. We have a rule now, the three of us. Seat 9 belongs to whoever is sitting beside me and most needs a Sunday afternoon: Lorraine, Marlene, Mike, a neighbor boy who shovels my walk without being asked. Seat 10 is for a guest. Every season, when I renew the account, I write at the bottom of the form, in the space for the reason, the same two words as the first: In gratitude.