Chapter 14: Seven Forty-One

On Friday I sat in section 128, seat 9, with a hot dog in each hand.

I did it on purpose.

Dad sat on my left in his Foxes cap, working on his third.

On my right was my mother-in-law, in a cardigan, with her reading glasses on a cord around her neck.

"I called every Carroway who owes me a casserole dish," Marilyn said.

She pointed over her shoulder with her chin.

Behind us, in row 14, sat sixteen of them, in a line, holding programs.

There were aunts and cousins, and a teenager who had been dragged along.

She was filming the pregame with her face turned away from her mother.

Todd's brother sat at the far end with his cap in his lap.

He hadn't said a word to me, but he'd come.

"Elizabeth," Marilyn said, "I am going to sit here and be looked at."

"You don't have to."

"I put my arm around that girl in my own yard in front of twenty-two people. I'd like to take that back where they can see me do it."

A man in the next aisle pointed at me and said, "Hey. Hot dog lady!"

Half a dozen heads turned.

The concession vendor on the steps stopped her tray and looked at my hands.

Then she put a third hot dog on top of the two I was holding.

"On the house, hon."

"Take it, Bethie," Dad said. "It's a dollar."

I took it.

I held three hot dogs while forty people looked at me and nobody said anything cruel.

It was the strangest thing that had happened to me all week.

At 7:20, a man in a navy suit walked down the aisle of section 112 with a Channel 3 crew behind him.

He had a reporter with a microphone and a camera operator with a light on a stick.