Around nine o’clock the front doorbell rings. I’m just finishing my second bowl of Great Grains, and Dad calls out, “Hey, anyone home?” Granma never locks the door after picking up the newspaper from the front yard.
When he comes in the kitchen, he’s wearing chinos and canvas sneakers; he’s got a short-sleeved collared shirt on. “Morning, Dorothy,” he says. That’s Granma’s name, but it’s funny to hear him say it—like, he’s being polite, but it’s a kind of politeness where you can tell people have known each other for a long time. “Hey, Jenny,” he says, because Mom just walked in.
She’s wearing a faded yellow dress, which she bought secondhand at a Mexican market in town, and leather sandals that go halfway up her ankles. Her hair smells nice—she just got out of the shower, and somehow when she walks in you can smell soap scent all over the kitchen. She looks good. She’s still got a summer tan, because the sun never seems to go away in Texas; and her hair’s a little longer than it used to be in New York; and she still goes swimming once a week, and you can see the muscles in her arms.
“Morning, Spencer,” she says. And there’s that same politeness in her voice—people being nice to each other who know each other really well, but maybe haven’t always been so polite but are trying now. “What do you boys have planned for today?”
“Did you manage to get a bike, Dad?”
And he looks at me, smiling; there’s sweat on his forehead. “That’s the thing about staying at ridiculously expensive hotels. You tell them you need something, and they sort it out.”
I suddenly feel kind of stupidly happy.
“You ready to go, Son?” he asks. “You don’t get mornings like this in London at this time of year.”
My shoes are by the door, and while I’m putting them on, Mom says, “When are you going to bring him back?”
Dad says, “I don’t know. I don’t really have any plans.”
“I guess what I’m asking is, should I get something ready for lunch?”
“It’s up to Ben,” Dad says, and for some reason, Mom loses it.
“Can’t you make any decision that involves some commitment to other people?”
“Jenny,” Granma calls out from the kitchen. “Just let them go.”
It must have rained overnight, because the lawn is wet and the trees that stretch over the road are dripping a little—sometimes a few drops hit you in the face as you bike past. But the sky is totally blue. It’s probably sixty-five degrees, just cool enough that you don’t mind working up a sweat. First we just bike around the neighborhood; it’s very flat and all the roads are empty, because it’s Saturday morning. My dad is good at biking without his hands—he’s got a real racing bike that makes you lean over for the handles, but he can also lean back in his seat and pedal without holding on. He looks funny—like he’s relaxed and concentrating at the same time. He can even turn corners that way.
“You’re just showing off,” I tell him.
Around ten o’clock he gets hungry again. “That’s the thing about jet lag,” he says. “I wake up at three in the morning and want coffee and a piece of toast. By nine o’clock I’m ready for lunch.”
We stop off at a diner and order a pancake breakfast, with bacon and eggs, the whole works. Dad puts a lot of Tabasco sauce on everything—he really is hungry. They do milkshakes there, too, and I ask him, “Can I have a milkshake?”
“At ten in the morning?” he says, but then changes his mind. “Sure, why not.”
When the shake comes, he asks for another straw and sticks it in. “This is what they call a stealth tax,” he says. “The government always needs a cut.” He sucks in a mouthful (it’s chocolate and Oreo), and leaves the rest to me. After that, we get busy eating; all you can hear is the sound of knives and forks on our plates and the background noise of the restaurant—the waiters talking to each other and some of the other diners making conversation. Some guy is on his phone, trying to order a new cartridge for his printer. It turns out to be pretty complicated.
“Coach Tomski seems like a nice guy,” Dad says eventually, just to break the silence. Maybe he feels he should talk about my life.
“He’s a good teacher.” But I feel funny saying it like that, like I’m being disloyal or something, but I can’t tell to whom.
“That kid Pete can play.” It’s like he’s just fishing, hoping for a bite.
“He’s a bully, I don’t like him much. He used to call me Ball Boy. He’s the kind of kid who makes up names for people.”
“Maybe he’s just competitive.”
“With me? What’s he got to be competitive about?”
“I can think of some things,” Dad says. For a second I think he means Mabley, but then he says, “You’re not a bad player yourself.” The waiter comes, and Dad asks for the check. He takes his wallet out and puts it on the table; he’s got all these receipts bursting out of it, and English money and different kinds of coins—it takes him a while to find a twenty-dollar bill.
“Are you serious about coming to London?” he asks.
My plate is sticky with maple syrup; there’s a bit of bacon left over, which I drag through the stickiness before eating. So we’re finally having the conversation.
“Do you want me to come?” I ask, without looking up.
“Of course I want you. It’s been a hard six months for me. A lot of adjustments, too much work. I’ve missed you.” Then he says, “I guess it’s been harder for you.”
“It’s been okay,” I say.
Then the waiter returns, and Dad pays him, adding another receipt to all the pieces of paper in his wallet. We unlock our bikes and ride to the park. It’s about fifteen blocks away—you can tell, because the streets in this neighborhood are named after numbers and letters. We just have to get to 44th and Avenue G. It’s like a simple math problem. Meanwhile the sun has climbed over the treetops, it’s almost noon. I can feel the heat on the back of my neck.
“What would Mom do if I came to London?” I say. “Would she come, too?”
“You can ask her.” He’s pedaling beside me, the roads are still empty, there’s just the sound of my chain going around (it got a little rusty in the shed) and sometimes a nut or twig cracking under one of our tires.
“Isn’t that something you should talk to her about?”
He slows down for a moment, and I coast next to him. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he says. Then we both drift to a stop. “The truth is, Ben, I don’t want you to get your hopes up about anything like that. You’re old enough now . . .” but he interrupts himself. “Nobody’s ever really old enough for this. I know I’m not. I guess when something like this happens, you realize that your parents are just . . . blundering people, too. But I want you to feel that you have choices to make, that it’s not just other people telling you what to do.”
“That’s not really what it feels like,” I tell him.
“I mean, it’s fine for you to think, at a certain point, I have to protect my own interests. I have to live my own life. My parents’ problems are not my problems anymore. Am I making any sense?”
“I guess.”
He waits for a minute and then he asks, “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Because I’m thinking.”
The swimming pool is still drained when we get to the park; the bottom is full of wet leaves. There’s a chain-link fence around the whole thing, and the gate is locked. It’s all a bit sad, like leftover summer. But a couple of kids are playing basketball on the court next door. They look like high school kids. One of them has a Tony Romo Cowboys jersey on, which is too big for him, even though he’s a pretty big kid. The other one is skinnier and dribbles a lot. Dad can’t help himself; he watches from the sideline—our bikes are lying on the curb.
“Do you want to play?” he says to me quietly.
“They’re just hanging out. They don’t want to play with us.”
“Well, we can ask them.” And he steps forward onto the court. “You gu
ys want to play a little two on two? This is my son here.”
“Sure, okay,” the Tony Romo kid says.
So that’s what we do. My dad looks funny when he plays—he moves like a different person. He has all this crazy pent-up energy and his legs and arms seem twice as long as everybody else’s. The skinny kid misses a shot, and Dad gets the rebound and passes the ball to me. “Shoot it,” he says. I’m about fifteen feet away, and when I miss, he gets the rebound again and passes it back again. “Shoot it again,” he says, and this time the shot goes in. That’s what it’s like.
“Dad,” I say quietly, when we get the ball back. “Give them a chance.”
We don’t stay very long, we just play to seven. He lets them score a couple of baskets. He’s very friendly and asks their names and asks them about school, but it’s also kind of weird, and I know they just want us to be gone. On the final shot, my dad steps back and takes a twenty footer, which touches nothing but net. It’s the first shot he’s taken all day—the rest of the time, he’s just been setting me up.
“How about that?” he says afterward. I can tell he’s pleased; this whole thing has put him in a good mood. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes his forehead. We get back on our bikes and the two kids just start messing around again like nothing happened—with the skinny kid dribbling around, and the Tony Romo kid trying to catch him. But it’s nice to feel the wind in our face again. Dad is shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, pedaling beside me. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”
It’s funny, though. Even though I was embarrassed, I’m glad we won; it feels like something has happened, a story, we were on the same team, and this time the shot went in. I’ll probably tell Granma about it later, and turn it into a joke, because those kids must have thought, What the heck? These two guys show up and kick our butts for five minutes, and then ride off again; but I also feel sad, because I think it probably won’t happen again.
We’re getting pretty close to home now—Dad doesn’t know where he is, and it’s up to me to lead the way, so I cross over 45th Street (there’s a little traffic at the lights), and then take a left toward Granma’s house, on one of the quieter back roads. I like showing my dad that I know this place, I like being in charge, but I also worry that maybe when he sees the house again, he’ll think, Ben is bored with me, he’s had enough. But there’s only so long we can bike around. Something has shifted. It’s not like I’ve made up my mind; it’s more like certain things are becoming obvious, and what really needs to happen is everybody needs to talk about them. Maybe Mom will have gotten some lunch ready, we can sit down around the kitchen table, like a family for once, though I’m not really hungry anyway.
Dad doesn’t say anything when he sees the house.
“When do you have to go back to Houston?” I ask him. He’s climbed off the bike and is locking it against one of the streetlamps.
“Not till tomorrow,” he says.
“So we’ve got all day.”
“We’ve got all day.”
I wheel my bike across the lawn, toward the shed at the side of the yard. It’s funny, I can see him standing in the front yard, hesitating—he doesn’t know if he should wait for me or if he should just go in. But then I guess he feels silly, or he makes up his mind, because he walks up the front steps, while I pull at the shed door, which always gets stuck in the grass, and shove my bike inside. Somewhere I hear the doorbell ringing but I also hear, across the fence, the noise of someone jumping on a trampoline—and I stand there listening for a while, to the slap of bare feet on canvas and the jangling of the springs, before I squeeze through the bamboo hedge to tell Mabley I’m staying.
About the Author
Photo by Caroline Maclean
BENJAMIN MARKOVITS grew up mostly in Texas and London. He sat on the bench for his junior high school basketball team in Austin, Texas, but managed, after college, to spend a season in Germany playing on a minor-league professional club team. He has taught high school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and written essays, stories, and reviews for the New York Times, Esquire, Granta, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Paris Review, among others. Benjamin has published eight award-winning adult novels. His awards include the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and a Pushcart Prize, and he was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists. Benjamin lives with his family in London, where he teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. This is his first novel for children.
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Copyright
HOME GAMES. Copyright © 2020 by Benjamin Markovits. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Cover art © 2020 by Linus Curci
Cover design by Catherine San Juan
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947143
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-274231-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-274230-8
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1920212223PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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