Miracle on 49th Street

by Mike Lupica

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong, we did finish our conversation,” he said. “Maybe you didn’t. But I did. It was a nice try on your part. And this is an even nicer try tonight. We need some of the guys off our bench to try as hard as you do.”

  Molly rubbed the place where she’d hit her head. She could feel the bump. Josh Cameron hadn’t even asked if she was all right.

  Molly said, “You don’t believe me because you don’t want to believe me.”

  He whipped off his cap then and threw it down on the backseat.

  “This is getting annoying,” he said.

  Tell me about it, she thought.

  “Here’s what I believe,” he said. “I believe you’re Jen’s daughter. I do. I believe she came up with a story about me being your dad, to explain why she ran off to Europe and never came back. I don’t know, maybe she thought there’d be some money in it after she was gone.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Molly said.

  “But what I don’t believe is some sneaky kid off the street showing up out of the blue and telling me I’m her father. And what I don’t like is that kid hiding out in my car and nearly causing a stinking accident on my way home from the game.”

  “I had to see you again,” Molly said.

  Standing her ground, even though she was sitting down.

  “For the last time,” he said, “either tell me where you live, or I’m going to drive around the corner to the Ritz, where I happen to be living right now, hand you over to the concierge, and have him deal with you.”

  All that work getting to practice, Molly thought. And he was right around the corner after all.

  Then she held up the envelope. “She wrote it all down in this letter to me, once she knew I was Googling you on my own. She said I should know the real you and not the one in the newspaper and in magazines.”

  “A letter,” Josh said.

  “My mom wrote a bunch of letters the last couple of months,” Molly said.

  She swallowed hard now, knowing she couldn’t cry in front of him but wanting to cry the way she did every single time she pictured Jen Parker in bed, propped up in front of all her pillows, her laptop actually on her lap, typing away. Her mom, who had dreamed about being a figure skater when she was Molly’s age, who had been a good enough athlete and a good enough skater and a hard enough worker to have that dream, wasting away before Molly’s eyes, like she was shrinking into herself.

  “They’re about all kinds of stuff,” she said. “Stuff that’s already happened. Stuff she thinks is going to happen to me as I get older. This one just happens to be about you.”

  She figured that would get his attention. Mom had said it always had to be about him.

  She went for it now.

  “You give me fifteen minutes,” she said, “I’ll let you read it.”

  “You sound like my agent.”

  Molly said, “I didn’t know I’d have to.”

  She wasn’t usually this sarcastic with anybody, particularly adults, but there was something about him that brought it out in her.

  “You’ve got a smart mouth,” he said. “I wonder where you get that from?”

  “My mom,” Molly said. “But just the smart part.”

  CHAPTER 9

  He didn’t actually live in the hotel part of the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Arlington Street. It turned out that there was a side of the Ritz made up of apartments, the awning in front reading “Two Commonwealth.” Josh Cameron pulled up to that door in the Navigator, got out on the street side, handed the parking guy his keys.

  Molly climbed into the regular backseat and got out of the car on the street side.

  The parking guy didn’t notice her at first. He was talking to Josh as the two of them came around toward the entrance.

  “We’re goin’ all the way again, Mr. C,” he said.

  “Why the heck not, Lindsay?” Josh said.

  Lindsay, in his cap and gray overcoat that had “Ritz-Carlton” written on the front, noticed Molly then.

  “This pretty little girl with you, Mr. C?”

  “Yeah,” he said, even though it sounded like more of a grunt to Molly.

  “What’s your name, pretty girl?”

  “Molly.”

  “And what’s your relation to the world’s greatest hooper?”

  Before Molly could say anything, Josh Cameron said, “Niece.”

  Niece, Molly thought.

  Nice.

  Then an amazing thing happened, even though she knew Josh was doing it just to get her inside. He took her by the hand.

  It wasn’t the way Molly thought it would be. Or had hoped it would be.

  Still, she held her father’s hand for the first time in her life.

  The apartment, with its view of the park and the lights of the city all around it, was at the penthouse level.

  But Molly thought the best view was inside Josh’s apartment, not what you saw when you looked out. The longest sofa she had ever seen in her life. The widest television screen. The thickest carpet.

  Some of the biggest trophies.

  She didn’t ask why he was living here, but he told her when they got inside.

  “I moved over here while I’m having my townhouse renovated,” he said. “Lock, stock, and Mattie.”

  Molly said, “Is Mattie your dog?”

  “Nah, even if she treats me like a dog sometimes,” he said. “Mattie is my live-in housekeeper, day planner, den mother. I’d call her my unofficial grandmother, but she’s not nice enough to be a grandmother.”

  “Why do you keep her around?” Molly said.

  “Because she’s indispensable,” he said.

  “Fascinating,” Molly said.

  She couldn’t help herself.

  “More sarcasm?”

  “You bring it out of me.”

  “Your mother used to make everything my fault, too,” he said. “Why don’t you just give me the letter, before your fifteen minutes are up.”

  Molly didn’t care how crabby he sounded, she had at least made it from the game to his car to here.

  “The kitchen’s that way, if you want something to drink,” he said.

  “I’m fine.”

  She sat down on the long sofa, which was so soft she was afraid she would disappear inside it. It was like she’d sat on some kind of cloud up at the top of the Ritz.

  Josh Cameron held out his hand, as if asking her to give back something she’d swiped. “The letter.”

  She stood up, walked over, and handed it to him. He handed her the remote for the television set. “Watch TV if you don’t want something to drink. Or check out the view. I’ll be back in a few.”

  He left her in the living room by herself, wondering how many other rooms there were in this place, wondering what Kimmy Evans would say if she knew where Molly was right now.

  She thought about calling Sam, but the only thing to tell him at this point was that she was sitting here in Josh Cameron’s living room. So she turned on the television, volume down way low, and found the New England Sports Network channel—NESN, as it was known in Boston—and watched the highlights of the Celtics game. For the second time tonight, she saw him doing all the amazing things he’d done to the 76ers. Some of them she felt as if she were watching for the first time, like she’d missed them the first time around, even though she’d been just twenty feet away.

  When the woman talking about Josh and the Celtics started showing highlights of other games, she thought about her mom’s letter.

  She knew what was in it. Knew practically by heart because she’d read it so many times.

  Her mom told more in that letter—or maybe just told it better—than she’d ever told Molly about Josh. She started from the time they first met in the bookstore at UConn. She’d asked what a jock was doing in a bookstore, and he’d told her, “I’m not like the other ones. I’m more than a jock.” And how she’d believed that for the longest time, until she began to figure out that he had settled f
or being a jock because that was the easiest way for him, that was the world he could control.

  She kept loving him anyway, even as she felt him slipping away from her, telling her the whole while that he loved her as much as she loved him. As much as he loved basketball.

  She finally decided that he would never love anything as much as he loved basketball. Or himself. Or at least the self, her mom wrote, that the world knew.

  There was a lot more to it than that.

  Later, she found out she was going to have a baby. She never considered telling him, because she could tell by then that a wife and a baby didn’t fit his plan—or his image—because his only plan involved the National Basketball Association.

  Her mom’s parents were both dead by then. She had been planning for junior year abroad, anyway, had given up on Josh Cameron asking her not to go. So she went. She went and took the money she had inherited from her own mom and dad and fell in love with London and never came home.

  Jen Parker said that she had planned to tell Molly the whole truth someday, when she was older. Maybe when Molly had become the college girl. But then Jen became sick. By that point Molly had actually figured some things out on her own, even though she didn’t know the real surprise until Jen told her, the day she finally admitted that the other dad was made up.

  “Sometimes I would tell myself,” her mom wrote, “that Josh couldn’t help loving you if he got to know you, even if he’s always thought all the love in the world should be directed at him.”

  She was watching a taped interview with Josh Cameron when the real thing walked back into the room.

  It occurred to her that the Josh she was watching on television was the one she had hoped to meet yesterday, and the one she was still hoping to meet today, even knowing what her mom had told her about him.

  It was the Josh Cameron everyone wanted to know and every kid wanted to be.

  Then, Molly thought, you actually did get to know him.

  He had the unfolded pages of the letter in his hand. He used them to point at the television screen.

  “Turn me off,” he said. “Please.”

  “Only because you said please.”

  “Sarcasm again?”

  Molly said, “I’m trying to quit.”

  “I’m actually a good guy,” he said.

  Molly remembered a line Sam liked to use. “Well, you play one on television.”

  “I give people the Josh Cameron they want, is all,” he said. “And it’s close enough to the real me.”

  “Right.”

  “Are you going to turn the TV off?”

  Molly did.

  He went and sat down in the big chair across from the sofa, one that had a UConn blue blanket draped over the back of it. Gave her the big smile from the TV Josh, as if Molly were interviewing him.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, kid…Molly,” he said. “You’re good.”

  “You’ve got to hand what to me?”

  “Hey, I’m paying you a compliment. You really are good.”

  Molly knew this was most definitely not good.

  Josh said, “This thing sounds just like her. And you obviously remember everything she ever told you about me.”

  Molly looked down and saw she still had the TV remote in her hand. She wanted to point it at him now.

  Get the real Josh to stop talking.

  Instead she said, “You think I wrote the letter.”

  Not even bothering to make it into a question.

  “We both know you did.” He nodded. “You took what she told you and then you came up with this version of things you want to be and voilà! A Dear Josh letter. Though I don’t come off too dear in all of it.”

  “My mom wrote that letter!”

  Molly was yelling at him and didn’t care.

  “Right.”

  “She did!”

  “You say in here that she used to say that the hardest thing for me was being honest with myself,” he said. “Okay. I’ll buy that. Maybe your mom was right about that. But how honest are you being, kiddo?”

  Kiddo now.

  Molly felt both her hands squeezing her knees now, as hard as they could. It was like he wanted her to cry. But she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

  “Jerk,” she said.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m just keeping it real. One of us has to.”

  “What’s real is that I’m your daughter,” she said, yelling again. “Why don’t you get that?”

  “Because that’s not real,” he said. “No harm, no foul. You took a shot. I’ve actually got to hand it to you. Not many kids your age would have had the guts to do what you’ve done the last couple of days.”

  Molly didn’t know whether it was because he was making her this mad or because she felt so helpless all of a sudden. Helpless, probably. She’d had a lot of helpless in her life lately. Whatever it was—she couldn’t help herself now—she felt the tears starting to come.

  Even though she only ever cried when she was alone.

  She wanted to say something else, but she couldn’t, feeling like a jerk herself now, barely able to catch her breath, crying like a big baby.

  Josh Cameron stood up. “I’ll call downstairs and have them get you a cab.”

  Then he crumpled up the pages in his hand, made them into a ball, and fired it across the room and into a wood basket that sat next to an antique desk.

  “Nothing but net,” he said.

  That was when Molly ran.

  CHAPTER 10

  When they had come into the lobby of Two Commonwealth, Josh Cameron had pointed to the door that he said opened into the lobby of the hotel part of the Ritz. When Molly came out of the elevator, she went through it, figuring that if Josh Cameron did care enough to follow her, he’d be looking for her out on the street.

  For once in her life, she couldn’t wait to get back to 1A Joyless Street.

  Molly was brave, but not a total dope, so she wasn’t going to run across the Public Garden alone at this time of night. She figured she’d go through the lobby, wait to see if the coast was clear on Arlington, then run over to Beacon and up to the corner of Beacon and Joy.

  That was the plan, anyway, and she sprinted through the lobby toward the revolving doors.

  “Whoa there, girl.”

  There was a tall young guy in a suit and a tie. Dark hair. Good-looking, Molly noticed. He was wearing a little name tag that read “Thomas O’Connor, Concierge.”

  “Where are you headed alone at this time of night?” he said.

  “Home,” she said. “I was visiting…a friend…at Two Commonwealth.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  Go with it, Molly thought.

  Do anything just to get out of here.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she said.

  “It’s practically the first thing they teach you at concierge school,” he said.

  “Josh Cameron,” she said. “You can ask Lindsay the doorman. He’s my uncle. Josh Cameron, I mean.”

  “Really?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Well, why don’t we call him?”

  “No!”

  Molly yelled at him the way she’d just yelled upstairs at good old Uncle Josh.

  “He was doing an interview,” Molly said, the words coming out of her like a pipe had just burst. “And I told him I’d have Lindsay call me a cab. But then I got downstairs and decided it was silly to take a cab over to Joy Street—I live on Joy Street—and, well, you got me, Mr. O’Connor.”

  “If Lindsay was going to call you a cab, what are you doing over on this side, then?”

  “I was going to buy a candy bar, but then I remembered I forgot to ask Uncle Josh for money.” She smiled and shrugged. “My bad, all the way around.”

  “Is Josh Cameron really your uncle?”

  “Well, I think of him as my uncle. Him and my stepmom went to college together and are still good friends, and so we’ve always acted as if we’r
e related, even though technically we’re not.”

  Somehow she managed not to gag on stepmom.

  Molly said, “So please don’t get me in trouble with him.”

  “There’s still the matter of getting you home.”

  Molly said, “Would you mind walking me? It’s really not far.”

  He told her to wait a second, walked over to the concierge desk, where there was another guy, older, talking on the phone.

  Then Thomas O’Connor came back and said, “Let’s go, kid.”

  Kid sounded better coming from him.

  “You can call me Molly,” Molly said.

  As they were walking up Arlington, she told Thomas O’Connor she had to call her friend.

  Sam answered on what Molly thought was half a ring.

  “Where are you?” he whispered. “I’ve been, like, sick worried. You said you were going to call.”

  “Way home,” she said. “Long story.”

  “Way home from where?”

  “His place.”

  “What the heck happened?”

  “Tell you at school. What happened with your uncle when he realized I was gone?”

  “I told him you didn’t want to wait and that he was busy, so you went home with the Hartnetts.”

  Stevie Hartnett’s uncle was the Red Sox manager, which made him a huge celebrity at school.

  “But how do you know Stevie was at the game?”

  “He could have been,” Sam said. There was a pause and then Sam said, “I’m under the covers, but I think my mom’s coming. Quick, tell me how it went?”

  “The absolute pits,” she said before hanging up.

  “What?” Thomas said when she put the phone away.

  “What what?”

  “What was the absolute pits?”

  “The game.”

  “You got to go to the Celtics game?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “Like I told my friend, it’s a long story.”

  “So I should stop being nosy.”

  “That would be good,” Molly said.