Empty Seat

My son Lou had been gone to college for six weeks when I finally did something for myself, and I mean really for myself. Not groceries alone. Not a library afternoon between classes. A whole evening, claimed and paid for, with nobody to ask permission of.

I am fifty-three years old. Lou is twenty. I raised him by myself since he was three, and I got my master's degree in May, and for the first time in twenty years there was nobody in my house but me and a very smug cat. So when the jazz festival announced that Harvey Denton was playing the renovated theater downtown, I bought one ticket. One. Single. Ticket.

It felt like a strange luxury, walking in alone. Women my age kept glancing over like they were checking whether I'd lost my party. I had not lost my party. My party was just me, and it was going great.

The lobby smelled like wine and perfume and that old-velvet smell theaters get when they've been restored by people who care. The evening was warm, one of those coastal September nights where the air feels like it's been sitting in the sun all day and only now getting around to cooling off. I found my row, D, and counted down the seat numbers. Fourteen. Fifteen.

Fifteen was occupied. By a man. A fairly handsome man, I should say, silver at the temples, gray linen jacket, sitting there like he belonged to the seat.

"Excuse me," I said. "I think that's mine."

He looked up with real surprise. "Oh no. Is it?" He checked his stub against mine. "They've double-sold it. This is the second time this month at this theater, I swear." He stood, apologetic and amused at once. "I'm sorry. They'll have you boxed in like a sardine now."

"Well, whose fault is that? Not mine, apparently."

He laughed. "No, definitely not yours. Look, fourteen's open, right here. I'm not attached to fifteen. I'll slide over and we can both stop apologizing."

"That's very generous of a seat thief."

"I'll take fourteen, the consolation seat, you take the innocent one. Fair?"

"Fair," I said, and sat down in fifteen while he moved to fourteen, and the matter was settled, or so I thought.

The opening act was a trio, piano bass and drums, and they were pleasant in the way pleasant openers are. Halfway through their second number, the man beside me turned his head and just stared at me for a moment.

"I'm sorry, I have to ask," he said. "Weren't you at Ambrose's graduation party, up on the deck, about twenty-five years ago?"

I blinked at him. "Twenty-five years ago. I was at plenty of parties twenty-five years ago, I was twenty-eight and famous for attending all of them."

"I'm Art. I was there with Ambrose. You came out to the deck and argued with a guy about Thelonious Monk for forty minutes and wouldn't let him win."

Something clicked. The deck. The argument. A tall skinny man in a terrible straw hat who had kept saying Monk's compositions were "architectural," which was such a strange word that I remembered it.

"You said architectural," I said slowly. "That was you."

"It was me! Nobody ever remembers that part."

"Ambrose. Wait. Ambrose was friends with my ex, Lou's father. That's how I ended up on that deck."

"Ambrose and I were in the same fraternity as him. We've stayed friends with him, sort of, the way you do. Christmas cards and sympathy." He stuck out his hand. "Art, properly. Arthur."

"Keisha." His hand was warm and dry and he held mine maybe half a beat longer than strangers do. "I can't believe you remembered my face after twenty-five years."

"I can't believe it either. But you know how a face gets filed away. Yours was filed under 'woman who would not concede the Monk argument.' Very memorable category."

I laughed, and I felt my whole face open up doing it, which surprised me. It had been a while since a stranger made my face do that.

Ambrose, it turned out, was down the row, Art's oldest friend, up from two states over to hear Harvey Denton play. Art and Ambrose had driven in together after Art got out of a long work week. All of this came out in the lull between songs, easy and unhurried, the way talk goes when nobody is trying to impress anybody.

"You came alone?" Art asked.

"Alone and proud of it. First free night I've had since my son left for school in August."

"Congratulations on both counts."

"Thank you. What about you? Married, single, complicated?"

"Single," he said. "A while now. Divorced eleven years ago, nothing since that stuck. You?"

"Never married. One son, one degree, zero husbands, and honestly I recommend the whole package."

"So you're the woman who has it figured out."

"I have nothing figured out. I just have it arranged nicely."

He liked that answer. I could tell he liked it, the way his eyes stayed on mine a moment longer than the joke required.

Then the house lights went down and Harvey Denton walked out, seventy-something years old and leaning on his cane until the second he picked up the saxophone, at which point the cane might as well have been a myth. The trio came back to back him. The first number was fast and showy and everyone loved it.

The second number was a ballad. Slow, warm, the kind of tune that seems to lower the temperature of a whole room by two degrees in the best way. And in the dark, with everyone leaning toward the stage, Art's shoulder settled against mine.

I would like to claim it was an accident. Maybe it started as one. But it lingered. Neither of us pulled away, and the velvet seats are cramped enough that you could call it the theater's fault, and I did not call it anything. I just let my shoulder rest against his and felt something in my chest flutter, an actual flutter, like a bird I'd forgotten I owned waking up.

I hadn't felt that in years. I will be truthful about how strange it was, that a