My phone rang at 3:40 on a Monday afternoon in early October, while I was on my knees in the garden pulling the last of the tomato vines before the frost got them.
It was Brody. My grandson does not call. He texts his mother and he texts his friends, but he calls me only when something is wrong, and his voice told me which kind of wrong it was.
“Grandpa,” he said. “It’s gone.”
I sat back on my heels with a tomato cage in one hand. “What’s gone, bud?”
“The hoop.” He swallowed. I could hear the wind behind him and a car going by. “It’s not there. There’s just a wet spot on the driveway where the base was.”
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I told him to stay put. I told him I was coming. I set the tomato cage against the fence, wiped my hands on my jeans, and went in to tell Lena where I was going.
My wife was at the kitchen table with the church bulletin and a cup of coffee gone cold. She looked up at my face and set her cup down without me saying a word.
“It’s Brody’s hoop,” I said. “Somebody took it.”
“Took it,” she said. “Who takes a basketball hoop?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said, and I went out to the truck.
The hoop
I should tell you about that hoop, because you cannot understand any of this unless you know what it cost him, and I do not mean the money.
Brody is 13. He is tall the way boys get tall at 13, all at once and without asking anybody, so that his wrists stick out of every sleeve and his shoes are too small by the time they’re broken in.
He plays point guard for the seventh and eighth grade team. He is not the best shooter on the team. He is the one who sees the whole floor, who knows where everybody is going to be before they know it.
His dad has been out in Rapid City since Brody was four. He calls on birthdays, most years. My daughter Kirsten has raised that boy by herself, working at the nursing home, picking up double shifts whenever the schedule has a hole in it.
So the summer Brody turned 12, he came to me and asked if I would help him get some mowing jobs. Not give him money. Help him get jobs. I was proud of him for knowing the difference.
I made some calls. I ran the grain elevator here in Mitchell for 31 years before I retired, and there is hardly a family in town I haven’t weighed a load of corn for, or argued with about moisture, or shared a cup of bad coffee with at the scale house.
By the end of that first June, Brody had seven yards. He mowed them with my old push mower, the one with the rope you have to pull three times and pray over the fourth. He was paid ten dollars a yard, sometimes twelve.
He kept his money in a coffee can on top of my refrigerator. Not his mother’s refrigerator. Mine. He said it was safer at Grandpa’s, and I did not ask what he meant by that.
The second summer he had nine yards. And at the end of that summer, in the first week of September, he counted the can out onto my kitchen table and it came to $211.
He had already picked out the hoop. It was a portable one from the farm store, the kind with a big plastic base you fill with water or sand, and a pole that goes up to a black and white backboard. It was $180 with tax.
He paid for it himself, in small bills, at the counter. The young woman at the register counted it twice and then smiled at him in a way that told me she had a little brother.
We put it together in Kirsten’s driveway on a Saturday morning. It took us four hours and one trip back to the store for a bolt that was missing from the bag. Brody filled the base with the garden hose and sat on it while it filled, grinning like a kid with a new dog.