by Mike Lupica
“I know that didn’t end the way you wanted it to,” Lucas’s mom said. “But he’s still the best man we know. And you do see the best in him.”
Then Lucas told his mom what he’d been thinking the last couple days, that he couldn’t help thinking this had somehow turned into a mystery.
“Maybe to you,” she said. “Just not to your grandfather.”
THIRTEEN
After changing his mind a few times, Ryan at least came up with his subject for the paper:
His tennis coach, Mr. Nichols.
There was no tennis team at Claremont Middle School. But there was a summer team at Claremont Country Club, where his family had a membership. And from the time Ryan had joined, he really had been better at tennis than basketball. He was a great natural athlete and, because he was so long, had a powerful serve that seemed to explode down out of the sky at his opponents.
He’d never loved baseball, or lacrosse, the sport Lucas played in the spring and then into the summer with his travel team. But he needed a sport to keep him occupied in the summer. What he did love to do was compete.
The problem was, when he’d started playing matches, he competed way too hard. As intense as he was when he was playing on a team, it was worse when he was alone on a tennis court, when it was just him and his opponent. He’d even broken a racket one time, and gotten defaulted out of the semifinals of a tournament it looked like he was about to win.
Mr. Nichols taught Ryan to channel his emotions in a positive way. He got him playing tennis all year round, and to appreciate what it was like in sports when the only teammate on whom you could rely was yourself. So Ryan would play tournaments in the area in the fall, and then in the spring, and all the way into the summer. He also came to love working with Mr. Nichols, the way Lucas loved working with Gramps.
Ryan was in Lucas’s room on Sunday afternoon when he told him he’d decided on Mr. Nichols as a subject. He asked how it was going with Lucas and Gramps, and Lucas told him he’d decided to move on to a new subject himself, and would probably end up writing about Mr. Collins.
“I’d still rather do one on Gramps,” Lucas said, “but not if he doesn’t want me to. And he really doesn’t want me to.”
“I know Mr. Collins isn’t as important in your life as your Gramps is,” Ryan said. “But I’m sure you’ll write a great paper.” He grinned. “But before you do that, you have to help me at least write a good one, because I feel like it’s match point against me if I don’t.”
Ryan suddenly grabbed his head with his hands. “I just can’t get a C!” he said. “That’s the deal. I keep thinking I could get my mom to slide a little bit on this, because she was a player once. But my dad isn’t budging.”
Ryan’s dad was the principal at Claremont High School. He was a really good guy, and Lucas knew he was a good dad. But he was as serious about education as Ryan’s mom had been about basketball when she was a star for the UConn women’s team.
“You know how we call Claremont Country Club ‘The Triple C’?” Ryan said. “Well, that’s all the Cs I’m allowed.”
“You’re not a C student,” Lucas said, “even in English. C’mon, dude. You got this. We got this.”
“Writing comes easy to you,” Ryan said.
“Nope,” Lucas said. “I have to work at it like everybody else. You just have to stop telling yourself you can’t.”
“But that’s the thing,” Ryan said. “I really can’t!”
“Yeah, dude, you can,” Lucas said. He grinned again. “When you’re serving in tennis, what’s the best way to win a big point?”
“Ace,” Ryan said.
“So stop talking about Cs,” Lucas said. “And let’s ace English.”
It took a while for Ryan to get going. As much as he liked to talk, and he really liked to talk, he often had trouble organizing his thoughts. So Lucas asked him to just go back to the beginning of his relationship with Mr. Nichols. As Ryan talked, Lucas sat at his laptop and wrote down what he was saying.
“I’m not going to write your paper for you,” Lucas said. “But if you can just see how some of it looks on the page, I think it might help you.”
“Then I can put it into my words,” Ryan said.
Lucas shook his head.
“No,” Lucas said. “These are already your words. When I’m done, and you look at this first draft, it will be your job to put them into complete sentences. And really make it sound like you.”
“You’re the one who should be an English teacher,” Ryan said.
“Nah,” Lucas said. “Not even close. That’s Mr. C.’s job. I’m just trying to give you a different kind of assist here.”
“But what if I hoist up an airball?” Ryan said.
“Dude,” Lucas said. “You gotta lose this attitude. If Gramps heard you talking like that, you’d never get off the bench.”
They went back to work. Ryan kept talking about why he loved tennis and how Mr. Nichols had made him love it even more. As he talked, Lucas tried to keep up with his typing, not worrying about making mistakes, just wanting to get down the important parts of what Ryan was saying. When Ryan finished talking, Lucas went back over what he’d written, cleaned it up, made it into three paragraphs, and printed it out for him.
“Can I tell you one more thing?” Lucas said.
“How to get the grade I need?” Ryan said. “That would work.”
“No,” Lucas said. “Don’t put off writing this thing until the last minute. Write a little bit every day. That will take the pressure off.”
“Nothing is going to take the pressure off!”
Lucas grinned.
“Weren’t we just talking about an attitude adjustment?” he said.
“Can’t I just borrow yours?” Ryan said.
“Don’t think it works that way,” Lucas said.
He asked if Ryan wanted to stay for dinner, saying he’d already cleared it with his mom. Ryan said he couldn’t, his grandparents were coming over to his house for dinner. Lucas walked downstairs to the front door. Before Ryan left, they pounded fists.
“You’re the dude,” Ryan said.
“You’d do the same for me,” Lucas said.
“You don’t quit,” Ryan said.
“Never,” Lucas said.
It’s why the next day he planned to go through the boxes in the attic.
FOURTEEN
When Lucas’s mom hadn’t finished her classes by the time Claremont Middle dismissed its students—something that usually only happened two days a week—one of his mom’s students would stay at the house until Lucas’s mom did come home.
Lucas’s favorite babysitter, even though he refused to ever call her that, was Lucy McQuade. She was more like an older sister. She was a sophomore at St. Luke’s College, and wanted to be a writer. When Lucy was in the house, she’d usually sit at the kitchen table doing her schoolwork and Lucas would go upstairs and do his, especially if he had basketball practice later.
But he didn’t do homework the next afternoon after school. He told Lucy that he was going upstairs to poke around in his dad’s old stuff up there.
“Is it okay with your mom?” Lucy said.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “My mom hardly ever goes up there anymore, because I think it just makes her sad, even though she says she’s never going to get rid of those boxes. But sometimes when I’m up there, I just feel as if I’m hanging with him for a few minutes.”
Lucy looked at Lucas over the screen of her laptop.
“I’m sure those boxes are full of some very nice memories,” she said.
“Sometimes even the nice ones make me sad,” Lucas said.
Even though they called it an attic, it wasn’t spooky or full of cobwebs. There was a small window that faced the backyard and let a fair amount of sun in. And Lucas’s mom, being his mom, had kept everything neat and organized. There was even a desk that had belonged to his dad.
Sometimes Lucas would bring his laptop up and sit at the
desk and write, and imagine his dad, the one he only knew through everybody else’s memories, looking over his shoulder.
Boxes lined the walls. A few of them had clothes in them, old basketball jerseys, even his dad’s varsity letter jacket from when he’d played for Claremont High. The box with the letter jacket in it had a picture of his dad wearing it, with his arm around Lucas’s mom. They looked happy in that picture.
They had started dating in high school, and his mom had always said, “We never really stopped.”
There were a lot of boxes filled with textbooks from med school. Lucas wasn’t sure why his mom kept them. But she did, along with some old black-and-white composition books filled with his dad’s handwriting, most of which Lucas could barely read. He wasn’t one to talk, of course. His handwriting wasn’t much to look at either.
There were a couple boxes with his dad’s trophies, going all the way back to when he played seventh-trade travel basketball, all bubble-wrapped for safekeeping. There were some cool photographs of Michael Winston at that age, looking a lot like Lucas.
Lucas picked up one now, and felt himself starting to tear up, the way he did sometimes when he was up here alone with the pictures and trophies and memories.
It wasn’t just the pictures of Lucas’s dad and his mom when they were younger. He always looked happy in the pictures, no matter what age he was. If it was a team picture, Michael Winston’s smile was always the biggest one.
The tears went away. His dad looked too happy. Lucas smiled. He knew from Gramps, and from his mom, that his dad had been some player before he tore up his knee. His mom had put together a scrapbook with old clippings from the Claremont paper about his dad’s career. Lucas had read the story about the night his dad had gotten injured, making a steal at the end of a game against Sheridan that saved that game for Claremont. There was a picture with the story showing two of his dad’s teammates helping him off the court.
Gramps was right behind them.
It brought Lucas back to why he’d come up here today. He just wanted to see if there was anything about Gramps he’d missed when he’d been alone up here with these boxes. He wanted to see if there was something, or anything, that would provide even a little information about him. All the other times Lucas had been in the attic, it was almost as if he were visiting his dad’s childhood. He’d never been up here trying to learn about Gramps. Now he wished there was a box with Gramps’s stuff in it. Only there wasn’t. There was nothing up here to tell Lucas about what Gramps’s life had been like when he was a boy growing up in California.
Maybe Lucas should have started asking him questions about that long before this. Or maybe if he had, the answers would have been the same as they were now, which meant no answers at all. All Lucas knew for sure was that by the time his dad had been born, his grandfather and grandmother were living in Claremont.
“C’mon, Gramps,” Lucas said out loud. “Help a guy out here.”
He decided to open up one more box. It was the one with his dad’s Chip Hilton books in it. These were the books that had been Michael Winston’s favorites when he was Lucas’s age, and that he had loved to read as much as Lucas did now. Lucas knew this because his mom had told him, telling him all the time about how these books in particular were most meaningful to him. By now, Lucas had read most of them too. They were about a star athlete named Chip Hilton, who’d grown up in a town called Valley Falls before he and his buddies went off to college. He played football and basketball and baseball, and the books would go from sport to sport and season to season. When Lucas was little, his mom would read Chip Hilton books called Championship Ball and Hardcourt Upset and A Pass and a Prayer as his bedtime stories. Lucas loved them all.
“These are the books that made you love to read before you could read,” his mom told him one time.
He was holding Hardcourt Upset in his hands when a picture fell out of it.
There were two basketball players in it.
It was obviously an old picture, Lucas could tell that just by looking at the uniforms. He couldn’t believe how small and tight the shorts looked. One player wore number 14. One wore number 24. There were holding the same basketball between them. Both the players had their hair buzzed really, really short.
BISONS was written across the front of their jerseys.
Lucas turned over the photograph. On the back was written a date: 10/15/61. Underneath the date were two names: Joe and Tommy.
They were standing underneath a basket, but there was nothing around them that identified the gym. It could have been any gym anywhere. Lucas couldn’t even tell for sure whether they were high school players or college players.
Both of them were smiling.
But who were they?
Why had his dad kept this picture?
Joe who? Lucas thought.
Tommy who?
He’d come up here looking for answers, and now just had more questions.
FIFTEEN
He took the picture with him down to his room. While Lucas waited for his mom to get home he opened his laptop, went to Google, and typed in, “Colleges with nickname or mascot Bisons.”
A bunch of them came up.
There was Bethany College in West Virginia. Bucknell in Pennsylvania. A university called Harding. Howard. North Dakota State. Oklahoma Baptist. Lucas didn’t know if they all had basketball teams, but assumed they did, because just about all colleges did.
Did one of them, the guy on the left, look a little like his dad?
Lucas couldn’t ever remember seeing a picture of Gramps at that age. But because of the date on the back of the picture, if the guy on the left did look like Michael Winston, it could have been Sam Winston in 1961.
But it didn’t mean that it was. Lucas’s mom would show him pictures of her from college, when she had a lot more hair than she did now, and even though he knew it was her, he wasn’t sure if he would have been able to pick her out of a class picture.
10/15/61.
Joe and Tommy.
Number 14 and number 24.
If they were college players, that meant the season was about to start in October, if the calendar for college hoops was the same then as it was now. Gramps would have played his college ball about that time.
But these guys were named Joe and Tommy.
If one of them wasn’t Gramps, why in the world had his dad held on to a picture of them? Maybe Gramps had stuck the picture in there a long time ago, even though Lucas couldn’t imagine why. Maybe these guys had been teammates of his, on a team called the Bisons.
Maybe, Lucas thought, he should just take the picture back up to the attic and put it back in the book and do exactly what his mom had suggested he do. Just move on. Leave this alone. Leave Gramps with his own memories, both good and bad. Maybe he should focus his energy on basketball and his journal and his paper on Mr. Collins, and do something else his mom had suggested he do and respect his grandfather’s wishes.
As confusing as everything had become, he didn’t want one school paper to come between him and Gramps. What was the point of that? He knew how special their relationship had always been. He knew how important that relationship was to him, and to Gramps, too. He didn’t know if Gramps would even want to keep coaching after this season. Lucas could see him slowing down, as enthusiastic as he still was about teaching. So if this was going to be their last season together, Lucas knew that his real energy—and his positive energy—ought to go into making it as special as possible.
Gramps talked constantly about playing the right way. Maybe moving on, and respecting his wishes—maybe leaving the past in the past—was a way for Lucas to do the right thing. Or maybe, just maybe, this was a picture Gramps had lost a long time ago, or one more thing he’d forgotten, and Lucas would be doing him a favor by showing it to him.
He’d have to think about that. In this case, he wasn’t sure what the right play was.
First he went downstairs and started to prepare their dinner s
alad, something he’d promised her he would do before they both left for school in the morning. He cleaned the lettuce, cut up some radishes and carrots and cucumbers. His mom liked to joke that he was on his way to one of those chef shows on television.
When she got home, he went upstairs, got the picture of Joe and Tommy off his desk, and brought it down for her to look at.
Her first reaction was to giggle, before looking at it closely.
“How did players manage to even run up and down the court in shorts that tight?” she said. “They looked like the basketball version of tighty whities.”
“I kind of thought the same thing,” he said. “But that’s kind of not why I’m showing you the picture.”
“Figured,” she said.
“Why would Dad stick an old picture of two guys named Joe and Tommy in one of his old Chip Hilton books?”
“No idea.”
“Is Gramps coming over for dinner tonight?” Lucas said.
“Probably not,” she said. “He always calls first and he hasn’t called today. You know him. Polite to a fault.”
They were seated at the table. She was waiting for water to boil so she could start cooking the pasta she was going to serve with chicken and broccoli. She picked up the photograph, really studying it now, frowning. Then she got up from the table suddenly and said she’d be right back.
When she came back, she was holding a picture of a young guy who looked like the Bisons’ player on the left. He had longer hair, slicked back, looking black in the black-and-white picture. But he resembled the player on the left.
A lot.
She placed that picture next to Lucas’s on the table.
“Did you find that one in the attic, too?” Lucas said.
“No,” she said. “It was in my room. In a little box of old pictures I keep in my closet that I haven’t looked at in a long time.”