The Hoop Across From the School

The neighbor

Kirsten’s rental is a small white house on a street of small houses on the east side of town. The driveway runs along the left side of the lot. On the other side of a strip of grass, about eight feet wide, is the driveway of Vernon Pask.

Vernon is 61. He works at an implement dealer out on the edge of town, in the parts department. He is a quiet man, short and broad, with gray hair cut close, and he keeps to himself.

Vernon also keeps a red pickup. I do not mean he owns one. I mean he keeps it the way some men keep a garden or a dog. It is three or four years old and it does not have a speck on it.

Every Sunday after church, Vernon pulls that pickup into his driveway, hooks up his hose, and washes it by hand with a bucket and a mitt. Then he dries it with a chamois. Then he does the tires.

The hoop stood at the end of Kirsten’s driveway, at the edge of the strip of grass. I had worried a little about where to put it. But there was nowhere else on that lot, and the way Brody shoots, mostly from straight on, it seemed all right.

For a month it was all right. Brody shot every evening until it got dark. He shot before school. Kirsten told me she fell asleep after her shifts to the sound of the ball, and she said she had never heard a better sound.

The dent

The Sunday before all this, Brody was out shooting in the afternoon. Vernon had just finished washing the truck. It was parked in his driveway, still beaded with water, gleaming.

Brody took a shot from the left side, which he does not usually do. It hit the front of the rim hard and came off sideways, the way a ball does maybe one time in a hundred, and it bounced across the grass and hit the back fender of Vernon’s pickup.

Brody told me later he heard it from the driveway. Not a loud sound. A small, flat sound, like knocking on a cupboard door. He went over and looked, and there was a dent in the fender above the back wheel, about the size of a half dollar.

He did not run. I want you to know that. He went straight up to Vernon’s front door and knocked.

Vernon came out. Brody told him what happened and said he was sorry. Vernon walked over to the truck, crouched down, and ran his thumb over the dent for a long time.

Then he stood up, walked back into his house, and shut the door. He did not say one word.

Brody went inside and told his mother. Kirsten was getting ready for a shift. She told him they would figure it out, and that she would talk to Vernon when she got home. But her shift ran long, and she got home at midnight, and it was too late to knock on anybody’s door.

Monday morning Brody went to school. Kirsten went back to work at six. And sometime that day, while that house was empty, Vernon Pask walked across the strip of grass, opened the drain plug on the base of that hoop, let the water run out across the driveway, tipped the hoop over onto its wheels, and rolled it into his garage.

Then he locked the garage.