The Hoop Across From the School

The note

On Thursday after school, Brody came in from the slab early because Kirsten was working late. With the sun still coming in the kitchen window, he sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and a sheet of paper torn out of his math notebook.

He wrote for a long time. He erased a lot. He crossed some things out and started over on the back.

I was in my chair in the front room reading the paper, and Lena was in the kitchen with him wiping down the counters, and neither one of us asked what he was doing.

When he was done, he folded the paper in half and then in half again. Then he reached in his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill, and he folded it inside the paper.

I set the newspaper down. “What’s that for, bud?”

“The dent,” he said.

I did not say anything for a second. That twenty dollars was more than he had made in two yards. It was all he had left from the coffee can after the hoop and his school supplies.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I want to.”

He put on his jacket. It was still light out, a little after five. Lena stood at the sink with the dish towel and did not turn around, and I knew why, because I could not have turned around either.

On his way home he walked past Vernon’s driveway, where the red pickup sat shining in the late sun, and he tucked that folded note under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side.

He did not tell me what the note said. I did not ask.

Nothing

Friday morning at eight, the red pickup came down our street. It slowed in front of my yard, the way it had every day. Brody was shooting.

I could not see from the porch whether the note was still under the wiper. I did not know if Vernon had found it. I did not know if he had read it, or crumpled it up, or thrown it in the trash with the twenty still inside.

The truck went on around the corner, the same as every day.

That night I lay awake for a while, thinking about a man with nothing much left but a truck, and a boy with nothing much left but twenty dollars, and wondering which one of them was going to have the harder time sleeping.

The second Saturday

The next Saturday was colder. The maples had dropped half their leaves overnight, and the slab was covered with yellow ones that Brody kicked off to the side before he started shooting.

He was out there by ten. I came out at eleven with a cup of coffee and stood under the hoop and rebounded for him while he shot free throws. He was making about seven out of ten, which is better than he had ever done in his life.

“Elbow in,” I said, the way his coach did, and he rolled his eyes at me and made the next three in a row.

At about eleven-thirty, a red pickup turned onto our street.

It was not eight in the morning, and it was not a weekday, and that truck had no business on our street on a Saturday morning. I knew it the moment I saw it. So did Brody. He caught the ball off the rim and held it against his hip and did not shoot.

The truck came down the street slow. It did not go past this time. It pulled over to my curb and stopped, right in front of the slab.

The engine shut off.

Vernon Pask opened the door and got out. He was in a flannel shirt and work jeans, and he stood there next to his truck for a second with one hand on the door, looking at the hoop.

Then he walked around to the back of the truck and let the tailgate down.

The old portable hoop was lying in the bed on its side. The backboard was wrapped in a moving blanket. The base had been rinsed clean. There was not one scuff on it.