The Hoop Across From the School

Saturday

Saturday was one of those October days that South Dakota gives you as an apology for the winter coming. Sunny and still and warm enough for a T-shirt by noon, though I kept my old canvas jacket on, since the shade still had an edge, with the maples along the street half turned.

Kirsten had worked a double on Friday, so she was asleep at home. She made me promise to take pictures. Lena made sandwiches. And Brody showed up at our door at 8:30 in the morning, which is an hour I did not know 13-year-old boys knew existed on a Saturday.

“It’s still not afternoon,” I told him.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll just sit here.”

He sat on the step for three hours. Lena brought him a sandwich. He ate it on the step.

At one o’clock I carried the pole sections out of the garage, and Brody about came out of his skin.

We bolted the base plate of the pole onto the anchor bolts first, with a nut and washer below and above on each one, so you can level the pole by turning the bottom nuts. I let Brody turn the wrench. He turned it like it was holding up the whole world.

Then the upper sections, and the extension arm, and the backboard. The backboard was the hard part. It is a big piece of black and white acrylic in a steel frame, and it is heavy, and you have to lift it up high and hold it while somebody gets the bolts in.

I am not too proud to say I could not have done it alone. Brody and I got it up on the stepladder together, him holding the bottom edge over his head and me on the ladder working the bolts in, and both of us breathing hard and neither of us saying a word.

When the last bolt went in, I came down off the ladder and we stood back and looked at it.

A new black and white hoop on a fresh square of concrete in my front yard, with the middle school sitting across the street behind it in the sun.

The first shot

Brody went and got his ball out of the back of my truck. He had brought it with him every morning that week, just in case.

He stood on the slab in his gray T-shirt and red shorts, with his buzzed hair still damp from the work, and he bounced the ball twice. Then he looked at me.

“You first,” he said.

“Not on your life,” I said. “It’s your hoop.”

I got down on one knee at the edge of the slab with my trowel, where we had pulled the forms off that morning, and started scraping the little ridge of concrete that had squeezed out along the bottom. I mostly did it so I would have something to do with my hands, and so he would not feel me watching.

He went up and took his first shot.

It hit the front of the rim, rolled around twice, and dropped through.

He did not holler. He did not jump. He just turned his head and looked over at me, still kneeling there with that trowel in my hand, and I looked back at him.

Then he went and got the ball and shot again.

Lena came out on the porch with her phone and took pictures for Kirsten. Then she sat on the porch swing for an hour and watched him shoot, and every so often I heard her humming one of the hymns from church the week before, the old one about the morning breaking.

The mornings

On Monday morning, Brody was out on that slab at a quarter to eight. He had come straight from his mom’s house, eaten a piece of toast standing up in Lena’s kitchen, and gone out the front door with his backpack still on.

He shot in his school clothes for fifteen minutes, then walked across the street and into school with the ball under his arm.

At eight o’clock, a red pickup came down our street.

I was on the porch with my coffee. I knew the truck before I knew the man in it. It is a quiet street at that hour, and that truck shone in the morning sun like it had been dipped.

It was Vernon. His drive to work at the implement dealer takes him past our corner. I had never thought about it before. It was the way he had gone every day for two years.

He slowed in front of my yard. Not a lot. Just enough. He looked at the slab, and at the hoop, and at the boy shooting free throws under it.

He did not wave. He did not stop. He went on down the street and turned at the corner.

On Tuesday he did it again. And Wednesday. Every morning that week, at eight o’clock, that red pickup slowed in front of my yard, and the man inside it looked at my grandson shooting, and then drove on.

I never said a word to Brody about it. I do not know if he noticed. I think he did.