The Hoop Across From the School

Vernon

He did not say anything at first. He reached in and pulled the base toward him, and I set my coffee down on the edge of the slab and went over and took the other end, and between the two of us we got it out of the bed and set it down on the grass on its wheels.

Then we got the pole and the backboard out, still in one piece, and stood it up beside the slab.

Vernon straightened up and put a hand on the small of his back. He looked at Brody, standing there on the concrete holding his ball.

“Got your note,” he said.

Brody did not say anything. He just nodded.

Vernon reached into his shirt pocket and took out the folded paper. It was soft at the folds, like it had been opened and closed more than once. He did not open it. He just held it.

“Dent came out,” he said. “Took me ten minutes with a suction cup and a hair dryer. Hardly anything to it.”

He held out the twenty-dollar bill. Brody looked at me. I did not say anything. This was not my conversation to have.

“You keep that,” Vernon said. “You earned it mowing. I know. I’ve seen you.”

Brody came off the slab and took the twenty. “Thank you, sir.”

Vernon put the note back in his shirt pocket. He kept it. I noticed that.

Then he turned to me, and for a second I thought he might say something hard, because his jaw was working the way Brody’s had on that first Monday.

“I shouldn’t have locked it up,” he said. “I should have just come over and talked to your daughter. I was sore about the truck. That’s no excuse.”

“No,” I said. “But I’m glad you came.”

That was all I said. I did not need to say anything else. A man who drives over on his own on a Saturday morning with a hoop in the back of his truck has already said the hard part himself.

He nodded. He looked at the slab, and the anchor bolts, and the new pole standing straight and true. He ran his eye along it like a man who knows how things are built.

“That footing go down four foot?” he said.

“Four foot,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “That’ll stand.”

The question

Brody was standing by the old portable hoop with his hand on the pole. I think he did not quite know what to do with it. There was not a driveway in the world where he could put it back.

Vernon looked at him, and at the hoop, and then across the street at the school, where a couple of little kids were riding bikes around the empty parking lot.

“These portable ones go down to seven and a half feet,” he said. “You crank it down. I looked at the instructions while it was in my garage.”

He was quiet for a second. He put his hands in his back pockets and looked at the grass.

Then he turned and looked at my grandson, not at me, straight at him, the way you look at a man you are asking a favor of.

“I was thinking the little ones from across the street might need one lower,” he said. “So, son. Could you use a second one?”