by Mike Lupica
She felt so tired all of a sudden, it was as if she had just played a whole basketball game herself.
When they got to Joyless Street, she pointed to show him how close 1A was to the corner. Thomas asked if she had a key, and she said she did. He said he’d wait until she was inside. She told him he didn’t have to. He said it was a service that the concierge provided at the Ritz every time the concierge made a new friend.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, putting out his hand.
“Same,” Molly said.
At least somebody was nice to her tonight.
Molly got inside, quietly shut the big front door, and hoped Barbara was asleep on the couch, which is the way her television watching usually ended when she tried to stay up late. She liked to joke that she didn’t watch David Letterman nearly as often as he watched her.
Barbara was asleep, snoring slightly, a blanket over her, the television on, a book on her chest.
Molly just left her there and tiptoed up the stairs, not wanting to wake anybody and have to lie about how getting to see the Celtics in person had been the grandest night of her entire life.
When she got inside her room, she pulled the yellow baseball cap Josh Cameron had been wearing from her back pocket, the cap she’d swiped when she got out of his car.
Sam always made fun of how much she liked those high-tech crime shows, saying that she couldn’t possibly understand what they were all talking about when they were looking through their microscopes.
He was partly right.
Molly didn’t actually know what DNA stood for, but she understood how it worked.
Even if all you had was somebody’s hair.
CHAPTER 11
They had worked it out with Barbara that Sam could come over after school on Monday, Monday being the day Barbara took Kimmy out to Wellesley. Wellesley was where Barbara had discovered the most exclusive, absolutely fabulous piano teacher in town.
Sam usually only came over when Kimmy wasn’t around. They didn’t get along.
She called him Yoda, from the Star Wars movies. He told her he would give her a nickname that reflected her lack of intelligence, but it would be pointless, since she wouldn’t get it anyway.
But they weren’t talking about Kimmy on the bus ride home—they were talking about DNA, which Sam had been checking out on the Internet.
“It should stand for Do Not Ask,” he said.
“Why?” Molly said.
“As in, don’t even ask how we’re going to get him and you tested.”
“You always say that we can figure anything out if we put our heads together,” Molly said.
“Mols,” he said, “it’s not like getting a flu shot.”
“We’ll think of something. We always do.”
“But say we pull it off,” Sam said. “The way this guy is acting, are you sure you still want him for your dad?”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“If we don’t want to throw him off one first.”
As usual, the bus let them off at the bottom of Mount Vernon Street, just up Charles Street from their favorite pizza place in the entire universe, Upper Crust. It was easier, not nearly as steep, to walk up Beacon to her house. But Molly liked Mount Vernon better, with its quiet shade and what looked like alleys but were really narrow streets with names like Cedar Lane Way. And off Mount Vernon was Louisburg Square, which by now she knew was as cool an address as anybody could have in Boston.
But that’s not why Molly liked what she called the Square. She liked it because, more than any little corner of Boston she’d seen so far, it reminded her the most of where she’d lived in London, on Lennox Gardens.
Back when she still had her mom and everything in her world was going to work out the way it was supposed to.
“Tell me again why we have to go this way,” Sam said. “It’s like Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon.”
“Because it’s pretty,” Molly said. “And it’s good exercise. I won’t even ask you to carry my basketball for me.”
She had her ball under her arm. There had been tryouts that day for the seventh-grade girls team, and Sam had convinced her to give it a shot, even though she had never played a day of organized ball in her life. So on Saturday they had gone over to City Sports on Boylston and Molly had bought her first basketball.
When Sam had asked her on the bus how tryouts had gone, she had said, “Fine.”
Which wasn’t entirely true.
The tryouts had been conducted during gym class. By the time they scrimmaged at the end of class, it was clear that Molly was the best one out there.
“You gonna be one of those players who carries the ball with them wherever they go?” Sam said.
“Coach said I should work on dribbling with my left hand. I’m a little weak there,” she said.
“I’m the one feeling weak,” Sam said.
It meant he was tired after one block. Molly never seemed to get tired. When everybody else was dragging at gym, she was still fresh. The other night, the NESN woman interviewing Josh Cameron had said something to him about how he looked fresher at the end of the game than he did at the beginning, and Molly had thought to herself, Well, maybe we have one thing in common.
“If I want exercise, I’ll go to the fridge and get us a snack when we get to your house.”
“It’s not my house.”
“Figure of speech.”
Molly said, “You complain every time we make this walk.”
“You’d be sad if I didn’t,” he said. “Admit it.”
“Not as much as you think,” Molly said, and laughed.
Sam made her laugh. He made her laugh even when she didn’t feel like laughing, when she didn’t think anything was funny or that anything would be funny ever again. Like when the subject of Josh Cameron came up.
Josh Cameron.
She wondered if she would ever think of him as her father.
By the time they made the right turn on Joy, Molly was telling Sam not to complain anymore so that he could conserve energy.
“Just let me say one more thing,” he said.
“No,” Molly said.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Don’t check out who’s waiting in the alley.”
Oh, my God.
Josh Cameron.
There was a small black woman with him. She had a beret on her head and a smile on her round face that almost seemed too wide for the alley where they were standing, the one you had to walk through to get to the front door at 1A Joyless. She was wearing a short topcoat and a dress underneath it and white high-topped basketball shoes. She was short and looked even shorter standing next to Josh Cameron.
To Josh the black woman said, “This her?”
Pointing at Molly, still smiling.
When he didn’t say anything, she said, “This has to be her.”
She walked over and started to put out her hand, then decided to give Molly a hug instead.
“I’m Mattie,” she said. “The nice one in the house.”
Molly pushed back from her. “Were you there the other night?”
Mattie shook her head. “I was still away, visiting my sister. Didn’t get back until the next morning, and he was already off to the airport. He didn’t tell me about it till today. Now here we are.”
She turned around to Josh Cameron and said, “You got anything to say, now that we are here?”
Talking to him like she was talking to a child.
“I was just waiting for you to stop and then I was going to start.”
“I’m stopped.”
“Hello, Molly,” Josh said.
“Excuse me?” Mattie said to him.
“Mattie,” he said. “Let me do this my way. And, by the way, remind me again: Do you work for me, or do I work for you?”
Mattie turned to Molly. “Let him do things his way,” she said, as if he wasn’t even there. “On account of he’s doing so good with you, doing things his way.”
“I can
actually speak for myself,” Josh said.
“No,” Mattie said, “you can’t. Not like a normal person would speak to people. Which is why you brought me with you.” Ignoring him again, she said to Molly, “He’s actually got people to do everything for him except play basketball. Maybe that’s why he even needs someone to say ‘I’m sorry’ for him.”
“I was getting to that, if you’d give me a chance,” he said.
“Then get to it,” Mattie said.
“I’m sorry,” Josh said.
“Really,” Molly said.
A little too sarcastic. Anytime he was in the area, it was getting to be a reflex with Molly, like when somebody tapped you on your knee.
It was perfect, if you thought about it.
A reflex jerk.
“Really,” he said.
He was wearing a knit cap pulled down pretty close to his eyes, maybe to use as some kind of disguise. And he wore his leather jacket. He reached into the inside pocket of it now and pulled out her mom’s letter. Somehow he had managed to smooth it out since tossing it in the wastebasket.
“I should have come after you the other night,” he said. “And then we had to go to Atlanta over the weekend.”
The Celtics had played their second game of the season on the road, Molly knew, beating the Hawks by eight.
“It’s easier with you just reading about you in the paper,” she said.
“Uh, Mols,” Sam said.
Josh seemed to notice him for the first time. “Wait a second,” he said. “I know you. You’re the kid from the parking lot the other night.”
Sam walked over and put out his hand. “Sam Bloom,” he said.
Josh shook his hand carefully, Molly thought, as if he still didn’t trust him. “Her partner in crime,” Josh said.
“We’re like the Hardy boys,” Sam said. “Except she’s not a boy.”
Mattie said to Sam, “Son, why don’t you and I go set on the front steps and let them talk while I let you talk as much as you want to me.”
Before Sam could answer, Mattie took him by the arm and walked him to the front stoop.
“Anyway,” Josh said, “Thomas told me where you live, and when I told Mattie the story—”
“You thought you’d stop by.”
“You really do sound like her.”
“Mattie?”
“Your mom.”
Molly put out her hand. “I’d like her letter back, please.”
“Not before we talk about it.”
“The other day,” Molly said, “I had to bribe you with that letter just to get you to talk to me.”
He smiled.
“I’ll give you the letter back if you give me fifteen minutes,” he said.
He was wearing an old gray sweatshirt under the leather jacket, jeans with holes in the knees, work boots. He said they could take a walk. Molly wanted to know how they could do that without people bothering them.
“Sometimes I can walk all around town when I look like this,” he said. “The difference between me and other people is that I just can’t stop.” He nodded at her. “You gonna bring that with you in case we find a hoop?”
Molly had forgotten the basketball under her arm.
She started to go give the ball to Sam, and Josh said, “Nah, bring it. I know this place a couple of blocks away.”
“You want me to come with you, in case you start forgetting to act like a human being?” Mattie said from the steps.
“I’m pretty sure I can take it from here,” Josh said.
“I may walk down to that Starbucks that looks like the First National Bank of Starbucks,” Mattie said. “Call me on my cell when you’re ready to go home. I’ll meet you back here.”
As Molly and Josh started walking toward Mount Vernon Street, Molly looked back at Mattie.
Who just winked at her.
Somehow walking in Beacon Hill with him dressed like he was, stocking cap pulled down tight, looking like a bit of a slob, didn’t cause a riot.
There were never a lot of people on the narrow streets once you got up here. Molly had noticed that from the start. It was like a cut-off-from-the-rest-of-the-world world. When there was a lot of traffic noise, you were surprised. Molly could imagine what it was like up here before there were even cars. This was an old part of Boston that hadn’t gotten torn down like the old Garden.
They walked in silence for a while, as if neither one of them knew how to start the conversation.
He pointed finally to one of the big old brownstones at the end of Louisburg Square. “I was in that one,” he said, “after I signed my first contract. Third year in the league.”
She didn’t say anything right away. She was trying to figure out why he was different today than the other times, or if he was just different because Mattie was with him.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
Just came out with it. People who didn’t know Molly thought she was shy, especially now that she was the new kid in school, something she’d never been before. But most of the time she just acted shy and quiet because she wanted to be left alone.
“You get right to it, don’t you?”
“That’s not an answer.”
He pointed at what looked like a little alley down to their left. Molly had passed it a bunch of times without paying any attention. Collins Walk, the street sign said.
“There’s a hoop tucked around a corner at the end of there,” he said. “C’mon.”
“So why are you here?” Molly said.
“Are you always this tough?”
Molly said, “You would be, too, if you were me.”
“Yeah,” Josh Cameron said, “I guess I would be.”
They walked down Collins Walk and made a right, and there it was, a basket that looked to be the right height to Molly. There was a free-throw line painted in green and the key-shaped lane they had on real courts. It wasn’t even a half-court, but there was enough room to shoot around.
“There used to be some kids who lived in this house right here,” he said. “I think they moved away. I’m not sure how many people even in the neighborhood know the court’s still here.”
Molly said, “Listen—”
He put up a hand. “I’m here because I felt rotten about crumpling up the letter and making you cry,” he said. “I’m not that bad a guy.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“I actually came down looking for you, but you weren’t on the street when I got out there, and Lindsay the parking guy said he hadn’t seen you.”
“I went through the hotel. That’s when I met Thomas.”
“He told me.”
“He’s nice.”
“And I’m not?”
“Not to me,” she said.
“Maybe we can start over,” he said. “How would that be? You giving me a chance.”
“No,” Molly said. She slammed the basketball down hard. “You’re the one who’s got to give me a chance.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Put yourself in my shoes for a second.”
It made Molly smile, no chance of stopping it, as she looked down at his Converse sneakers.
“They’re too stinking big.”
He said, “You smile like her, too.”
He asked for the ball. She bounced it to him. He told her to cut for the hoop. She did. He bounced a ball to her, but it bounced too high. Somehow Molly caught it over her head, brought it down, managed to shoot the ball in the same motion, underhanded, like a little scoop shot.
She didn’t think about doing any of it. She just did it. The ball looked like it was off-line when it hit the backboard, but somehow had enough spin on it to go through the net.
When she collected the ball, she noticed him staring at her, a funny look on his face.
He extended his hands again, asking for the ball.
Again without thinking, not even looking at him, Molly casually flipped the ball to him behind her head.
It was just like g
irls’ practice.
The ball just sort of ended up exactly where she wanted it to.
After what seemed like a long time, another long silence, still staring at her, he said, “You’re pretty good.”
Molly stared back at him.
Neither one of them had noticed that Mattie had followed them to the little court.
“Where in the world do you suppose she gets it from?” Mattie said.
CHAPTER 12
Molly and Sam were sitting on a bench in the Tadpole Playground, the one with the statue of a frog sitting above the entrance. Molly liked it there, watching little kids go down the slides or across the monkey bars, jump down onto a rubbery surface made for soft landings, and mostly just be happy. But usually she had to drag Sam here, because of the frog statues everywhere you looked.
He’d tell Molly the dopey frogs reminded him too much of himself, like he was surrounded by all his cousins, and she’d tell him to shut up.
Which he would.
Until they both had enough of the silence and Sam decided it was time to tell a joke.
It was another part of their friendship that just was, another thing that made Molly feel as if she’d known Sam Bloom her whole life. He was her soft landing.
“I still don’t get why he read the letter again after he threw it away,” Sam said now.
“Well, he left out one big part,” Molly said. “He did take it out of the wastebasket. That part’s true. But Mattie found it on his desk in the morning and read it and started firing questions at him as soon as he got up.”
“She reads his mail?” Sam said.
“Like your mom reads your e-mails sometimes,” Molly said. “Which sort of figures, because she acts a lot more like his mom than his housekeeper.
“Anyway,” Molly said, “Mattie started asking where was I, and he told her what had happened the night before. Then I guess she yelled at him. She told me that she made him read the letter again, but told him to do it with his brain attached to him this time.”
This was no Indian summer day in Boston, despite the sun Molly felt on her face. They were lucky, she thought, if the temperature was much more than fifty degrees.
She thought to herself, It would be a beach day in London.
