I laid the white envelope in front of Kendra and let her read the first line. “That company is writing to me, dear, because they bought my fish fry batter recipe for five million nine hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “I mixed that batter in the back of a supper club on Mason Street for forty years, and my son told you it was just a kitchen hobby. It will be sold in grocery stores from here to Texas, and my name is on the box.” Kendra read the page twice. Brad kept his eyes on the cheese curds, which had gone cold on the plate, and for once he did not say a word.
“Ma, I can explain about the tickets,” Brad said at last. “Section one nineteen, son,” I said. “Eight home games, eleven thousand eight hundred forty dollars. Two seasons, twenty three thousand dollars in all. Your father held those seats for forty three years, and he took you to your first game when you were six, with a thermos of cocoa and a hat that came down to your nose.” I set down the transfer form. “The man at the Packers office showed me the signature. It says Arne Lindahl. Your father has been gone for three years. He could not have signed a thing.”
Kendra turned to her husband, her face white. “Brad, you told me your mother gave you the seats. You said she did not care for the cold anymore.” “I thought she would have given them to me,” Brad said, and his voice cracked. Kendra pushed her chair back from the table. In the hall, the old clock chimed the half hour, and from the street came the faint sound of a snowplow scraping the curb. I touched the faded green and gold scarf that Arne had worn to every game, the one I had carried up from the basement and laid across my knee for courage.
A season ticket in Section one nineteen gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the family in Green Bay.
I kept my voice as calm as a frozen lake. “Here is what happens now. Within ninety days you will repay every dollar from the tickets, from your own pay, and you will sign a letter telling the team office what you did. The seats go back into my account tomorrow morning. The rent you charged me for the basement will be refunded, all of it, because a mother should not pay for a room in the house of her own son. And I will be gone from that basement by the end of the month, because I have bought a little place in De Pere.” Brad lowered his head into his hands.
On Friday night I went to the supper club, and a surprise waited at the door. The new owners had kept every employee, and the dining room was packed to the walls. Regulars I had served for thirty years stood to greet me, and the neighbors who had sat beside Arne in Section one nineteen all those seasons had come in a group. A big man named Lloyd, who sold insurance and had never been known to cry, took my hand. “Solveig, your Arne talked about you every Sunday,” he said. “We always wondered how one man could be so lucky.” I could not answer him, and no one expected me to.
The money consequences came without delay. Brad sold his snowmobile and his ice shack within the week, and for the first time in his life he sat down with a ledger and a pencil. Kendra moved the household account to a bank in her own name, and she took over the bills. The father of Kendra, a retired foreman from the paper mill in Kaukauna, told Brad in the driveway that a man answers for what he takes. Brad took an extra shift at the distribution center, and the payments arrived on the first of each month, in cash, in an envelope with a short note.
I did not want to remember that night as the end. With part of the sale money, I started something in the memory of my husband. The Arne Lindahl Seats gives two tickets to every home game, free of charge, to a veteran or a senior from Brown County who has never seen a game at Lambeau Field. We choose the names through the church raffle, and I sit near the first pair myself with a thermos of hot cocoa. The first winner was an eighty four year old man from Howard who wept at the opening kickoff. He told me he had listened on the radio since nineteen fifty six.
Kendra visited me at the new house in De Pere a few days after I moved in. She carried a pot of beef barley soup and a basket of clean towels. She told me she was sorry, and she kept saying it, until I took her hands and told her that sorry is a good beginning but a poor ending. She nodded. Then she asked if I would teach her to make the batter, and I said yes. We stood in my little kitchen and measured flour, and she dropped the first cheese curd into the fryer with her tongue between her teeth like a girl.
Brad came to the supper club on a Friday afternoon, as I had asked, and I put him in the kitchen with an apron and a pair of tongs. He did not know a thing about frying fish. For six hours he stood over the hot oil, dipping cod into batter and lifting it out gold and crisp, with the sweat running down his face. The line cook, a cheerful woman named Doreen, corrected him gently every time he went wrong. By the dinner rush, he was singing under his breath. When I came to check on him, he held up a perfect piece and grinned.
On the opening Sunday of the next season, I walked into Lambeau Field with a thermos and a green and gold scarf, and I found Section one nineteen. Brad sat beside me in the seat of Arne, and Kendra sat on his other side. The air was bright and cold, and the band was playing, and the whole stadium rumbled like a thundercloud. When the Packers came out, Brad leaned over and whispered, “Ma, thank you for giving me another chance.” I poured him a cup of cocoa and wrapped the scarf around his neck. “Your father would be proud of you,” I said, “and so am I.”