by LJ Alonge
I try to slip the stack of money under Granny’s ashtray, but it lands with a thud and startles her awake. She drops the remote and looks around, wild-eyed, breathing fast. I stay crouched near her feet, too afraid to move. I hold my breath until I can feel the air about to burst out of my throat. Then she collapses back into her chair, and I wait until she starts snoring again before I crawl out the front door on my hands and knees.
CHAPTER 3
HOOP DREAMS
No two basketball courts are alike. Each has its own flavor, its own little quirks you have to know if you want to play like yourself. Sometimes it’s a rim that makes the ball bounce funny, or there’s a bubble under the wood, or the lighting’s too bright or too dim, or it’s so humid you can’t grip the ball the way you want. As far as I can see, this gym is perfect: The hardwood’s springy, the air-conditioning’s working, the rims look forgiving. My guys aren’t here yet. I walk past a couple full-court games—they’re all standing around, arguing about fouls—to an empty half-court in the back of the gym.
Starting in the corner, I shoot until I make it, and then I take a small step right and shoot, and then another step, until I’ve gone all the way around the three-point line. They say you should visualize the ball going through, and that’s what I do. Then I start over, taking small steps in the direction I came from. Watching the ball go through the hoop never gets old. I’m happy.
When I’m done warming up, I walk over to a shrimpy kid at one of the far courts. He has to crane his neck to look me in the eye. I pull out a sweaty five-dollar bill.
“You beat me,” I say, “and it’s yours.”
He looks around in shock, like he’s wondering if anyone is seeing this. “You might as well hand it over now,” he says.
The nerve of this kid. “You got five?”
He pulls out some ones and change.
“Matter of fact,” I say, “I’ll give you five bucks if you score.”
The game doesn’t last long enough for me to break a sweat. By the time I finish him off with a foul-line jumper, his face is ashen, like he’s seen a ghost. He doesn’t even look at the rim to see if the ball goes in. Instead, he stomps off the court, throwing down his money so that I have to walk around to pick it up. Ten minutes later he comes back with his friend, some kid wearing a headband and mouth guard, and I beat him, too. Then that kid’s friend steps up to me. I’m up fifty bucks when I hear someone bouncing a ball behind me.
“So you think you can shoot,” a voice says.
I don’t turn around. “A little busy here.”
“How about a little competition? Winner gets something way more than five bucks.”
Now I turn around.
“A little competition,” he repeats. “Winner gets a prize.”
You must be kidding, I think. He’s a little guy in a bright yellow tracksuit; his pants stop just above his ankles. Bald as a basketball. He makes me think of elderly substitute teachers, the ones who sit in front of the class doing a crossword puzzle, too frightened to speak. He dribbles the ball once, and it seems to surprise him when it snaps back into his hand.
“What’s the prize?” I ask, pretending to be uninterested.
“You’ll see when you win.” He shoots, a steep, looping arc on the way to the basket, and the ball clanks off the side of the backboard, toward me. I hand him the ball. He smells like laundry detergent, like easy money.
“Let’s do it,” I say.
It’s a race, he explains. First to ten makes. All net or it doesn’t count. Get your own rebound. His voice has cooled off, gotten hard. He sounds, for the first time, like he knows what he’s talking about, like maybe he’s done this before. We take up positions on opposite sides of the court. I lock in, I visualize. The sounds on the other side of the gym—someone fouled someone else too hard—begin to fade. My fingers slot into the ball’s familiar grooves. I look at the front of the rim like all the great shooters say you’re supposed to. I’m not nervous. I’ve hit thousands of jumpers, in the rain, in swirling winds coming off the bay, on outdoor courts with no lights. My first shot goes up, and the net makes that sharp splashing sound.
The bald guy’s ball does the same. And from the way he’s made eight shots in a row without breaking a sweat, it’s pretty clear I’ve been suckered. All that bumbling earlier was Oscar-worthy. Now he holds his ball so I can catch up a little, and I start rushing my shots, missing more, wincing when the ball clangs off the rim. I feel my hands getting sweaty, slick. Finally, he puts me out of my misery: He sends up his tenth shot and keeps his arm outstretched as it goes through.
“No hard feelings,” he says. He isn’t even sweating. He reaches up to pat me on the shoulder. I step back and tell him that was bullshit.
“You want to play again?” he asks.
“Best two out of three,” I say.
He beats me again.
“Now do you want to know what the winner gets?” he says, smiling.
I’m not stupid. I’m not going to follow him down some dark alley. And besides, I’m tall enough to see the baldest spot on the top of his head. He couldn’t drag me off anywhere if he wanted to. But he’s spinning the ball on his finger, and I’m so curious I can’t help myself. I ask him what he gets.
“You’ll be coming to the Bay Area Ballers tryouts,” he says.
I take a step back. “The what?” I ask, although I know exactly what that is.
“They start this Saturday at seven. The Bay Area Ballers are the premier—”
I hold up my hand. The truth is I don’t need an explanation. The Bay Area Ballers only send their players to colleges that matter: UConn, Tennessee, UCLA, Baylor, Notre Dame. Playing with them is almost a guarantee that you’ll get a scholarship. I’ve watched their games on ESPN.
“So you’ll be there?” he asks.
“Are you, like, the coach or something?”
“I help out.”
“And you’re inviting me?”
“Yup.”
“Even though I lost?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “Just something about you.”
That night I play out of my mind. The rim is Hula-Hoop big. Every time I make a shot I picture myself in the black Ballers uniform, an announcer with a big silky voice shouting my name.
Now that we’ve all been playing for a while we work like a unit, with every one of us knowing our place. I get giddy just stepping onto the court with Justin, Frank, Adrian, and Mike. Sometimes you hear an announcer talk about how a team is like an organism, and I thought it was the corniest thing until Ms. Dobb’s biology class last semester. We learned about cells, how each part of a cell has to function for the whole thing to work. The nucleus makes the ribosomes, the ribosomes make the proteins, the endoplasmic reticulum carries the proteins. Under the microscope, a cell dances happily, shimmying inside its cell wall. We hum along, beating teams that are bigger and older and stronger, because we know one another.
We stay on the court for four hours, not losing once.
“Something’s gotten into you,” Mike says, sneaking up behind me at the water fountain.
I jump. “Just felt it today.”
He puts his finger to his lips and narrows his eyes. “No, something happened. You have a look in your eyes.”
What can I say? They’d never speak to me if they knew I was leaving the team now, right when we’re getting good. I splash some water in my mouth and look at him with my best poker face. “What look?”
“The same look I had when I got my show. The way you look when you think you’ve found the answer to all your problems.”
CHAPTER 4
GOING, GOING, GONE
“No more basketball,” Granny says. It’s morning. I got up early, still buzzing from last night. She’s not happy with what I made yesterday. “We miss
out on customers when you close the shop early.”
“But, Granny—”
She holds up her hand. “Take it up with God. I need you here.” I know there’s no point in arguing. Granny’s lived too hard a life—Jim Crow, the LA riots, the Loma Prieta earthquake—to take anybody’s complaints seriously. If you’re not on your deathbed, she’s not trying to hear it. I slam the door on the way out.
The morning goes by slowly. In the afternoon I sit on the sidewalk outside, watching the squirrels run up the telephone poles and over the power lines. The fog stays clamped down like a lid. I could run away, I think. Like in those stories about a sad kid with a third arm who runs away to join the circus. But where would I go? What would I do? I’ve got no skills except working a register, making honor roll, and playing basketball. I doubt I’d make it past the city limits without accidentally eating some poisonous berries. I shudder.
Later on Ms. Evans walks in with her son, the cop. Ms. Evans is thin-limbed and spry, but he holds the crook of her arm as they walk around the store, anyway. It’s his first time here, and the way he pinches our fabrics and looks over his shoulder like something’s about to jump out at him—it makes me nervous.
“Nothing for you?” I ask sweetly when they come to the front of the store. Ms. Evans wants to buy a special hand-pressed rosehip oil that is really just canola Granny added some red food coloring to.
“So how can you prove that everything here does what you say it does?” He picks up one of our healing bracelets and then throws it down into the pile and wipes his hand on his shirt.
“All of it has the stamp of approval from my grandmother.” That’s what I’ve been told to say. People still love Granny. The other day they did a write-up of her in the paper, celebrating her twenty years of business. There’s talk of a potential mural in an alley down the street.
“Yeah, but I want to know if you have any evidence”—he takes the bottle of oil out of his mother’s hand and holds it under a lamp—“that using this actually adds five to ten years to your life.”
“Hush,” Ms. Evans says. “This place has done a lot for me.”
Her son folds his arms, his large biceps tensing. After they walk out, he throws his hands up and points back at me, yelling things I’m too far away to hear.
Granny’s up when I get upstairs, for a change. She may be a hag who wants to kill my dreams, but I still love her. I tell her about Ms. Evans and her son.
“Ha,” Granny says, rolling a cigarette.
“You’re not worried?”
“Dealt with a whole lot worse than a meathead mama’s boy.”
“So what do I do if he comes back?”
“What kind of stupid question is that? Try to sell him something!”
He comes back the next day, wearing sunglasses, as if I wouldn’t recognize him. The sight of him gives me a bad-seafood feeling somewhere deep in my gut. I pretend to restock some candles as I follow him from aisle to aisle.
“You’re a cop, right?” I ask.
“Have we met before?” he asks.
“You were in here yesterday with Ms. Evans.”
He takes off his sunglasses and squints at me. His eyes are bloodshot. “Yes.”
“So maybe you’re looking for, like, a mug or something? We’ve got some mugs.”
He smiles a big, unsettling smile. “Really? And what special powers do those have?”
I give him one of the mugs. The clay has big cracks, fault lines running up and down that make it look a lot older than it really is. “The volcanic clay in these helps with oral and digestive health.”
“Where’s the owner of this place?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to ask her some questions directly.”
Sometimes you don’t know what to do and you end up doing the dumbest thing possible. I go upstairs and ask Granny if she can answer some questions.
“Sorry,” I say when I get back downstairs. My ear burns from Granny pinching it, and I try to hide the fact that I really want to rub it. “She’s not here.”
“Are you sure?” he asks.
I nod eagerly. “Yup, I checked.”
“Well, I hope you find her.” The mug slips out of his hands and shatters into a million pieces on the linoleum.
“Maybe I can answer some questions! What do you want to know?” I yell, stepping over the clay and following him outside. “Where are you going? Somebody has to pay for that mug!”
Later this morning our neighbor Mr. Graham has a heart attack during Zumba class. Two cop cars jump the curb right outside our store with sirens blaring. An ambulance speeds up behind them, and two burly guys in all white rush into the gym across the street. All of us on the block watch as they wheel Mr. Graham out on a stretcher. It’s a minor attack; he gives a thumbs-up and takes off his oxygen mask to remind us of the importance of daily exercise. I think of Granny and what would happen if she had a heart attack, if she’d demand that they let her take her smokes. When I get upstairs, the door’s wide open. The TV is off. Granny is not in her La-Z-Boy. A cigarette smolders in the ashtray, and under the ashtray is a note:
Could feel the heat from up here Don’t be mad will be back soon (I bet you didn’t know this old lady could still cut and run if she had to!) Make sure to keep the store open like we talked about I don’t want to hear about my store being closed check the fridge for rice if your hungry when you see your sisters tell them I ain’t too old to give them a spanking because from what I’m hearing that’s what they asking for
Gone is the sweet-smelling lavender oil she uses for her morning baths. Gone is my milk-jug college fund. Gone are the stacked photocopies of newspaper profiles Granny liked to pass out to people who walked past her store. Every picture makes her look like the sweetest old lady.
The best place to hide is right in front of everybody. I leave the store open all day, because I know it’s what Granny would want. Tonight I decide to check out Granny’s old haunts. I don’t want to look for her, but I know she hates the idea of me not looking for her whenever she up and leaves. She couldn’t have gone far this time, not with that bad leg. Outside, the moon hangs low and yellow like a dingy lightbulb. Cold nips at my calves. I’m in one of my sisters’ dresses, so thin it surprises me every time the winds blows it against the backs of my legs. If the twins see me, they’ll try to snatch the dress off my back—I’m not allowed to touch any of their stuff without permission. Their makeup makes me look way older than I am, and I try to remember their hip-swaying walk as I approach Jeffery’s Lounge. I get past the burly security guards, no problem. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Old, sad jazz songs play on a raspy jukebox. The scent of old-lady perfume is overwhelming. A guy stumbles toward me with a sleepy smile on his face, his feet making a jagged line below him, and I have to dodge his hand when he tries to touch my hair. It feels more like a funeral than a party. I walk past a woman sitting in a man’s lap, her hand sliding down somewhere deep under his shirt.
“You see an older woman?” I ask the bartender. “Bad leg?”
“Lots of older ladies with bad legs in here.” He laughs. “What’s she go by?”
I don’t want to say. Embarrassed, I smile.
He sets down a napkin in front of me and then quickly takes it away. “You don’t look that old.”
I look around one last, frantic time, and then I run out. I check Sula’s and Petit Peu’s. I check Shoeless Mo’s Bar and Grill. I’m going home after Eureka’s, I tell myself. Granny’d be happy with this kind of sleuthing.
I’m a block away from Eureka’s, and I can already hear the sloppy, high-pitched voices. Inside, everyone is sweating and no one is moving. The floor is sticky, and there’s a salty-sweet stench that forces me to breathe through my mouth. I have to cover my eyes from the rainbow strobe lights blinking overhead. Granny loves places like this. My sist
ers hang out at clubs like this four nights a week. Now, finally, I get it: There’s a freedom in the darkness, something about all of the sequins and jewels that makes it feel like a dream, like you’re inside one big, pulsing secret.
If Granny’s here, I won’t be able to find her. There are just too many people, too many shoulders to see past. I watch people get swallowed by a dark pulsing center in front of me. Finally, I get some space. I jump up once, hoping I can see Granny. Straight up, like there’s something scary beneath me, like I’m grabbing a rebound.
CHAPTER 5
THE (NOT) FAIR
Today I’m meeting the boys at the fair. Since Granny is still gone, I put up the CLOSED sign on the store’s front door and hide upstairs as Ms. Evans tries the handle over and over. When she leaves, I walk to the bus stop at the end of the street, jumping over two, three cracks in the sidewalk at a time. I don’t remember it ever being this sunny. I don’t remember the breeze ever smelling so clean.
I love the fair. Every summer it rolls into town and plops down behind an abandoned butchery like your noisiest, drunkest uncle. Every last part of it—the Ferris wheel, the sugared funnel cake, the adult-size teddy bears—is way, way, way over the top. You pay your ten bucks at the gate, and after five minutes you’ve pushed your sister into an ostrich at the petting zoo and everything is worth it. The first time I ever shot a basketball was at the Alameda County Fair. I was four or five, and Granny had to hold me up under the armpits to get the shot off.
Justin, Frank, and Adrian are horsing around near the gate, trying to hit one another with their plastic entry bands.
“Where’s Mike?” I ask.
They say he’s meeting us in one of the fields in the back, where there won’t be any kids trying to get an autograph.
