by Mike Lupica
Somehow, in a season where his team hadn’t lost a game, Lucas felt as if he’d lost Gramps and his best friend, too.
His two best friends.
* * *
Mrs. Moretti coached the first game back after Christmas, the Saturday before school would start up again. She said Gramps had called her the day before and told her that he wouldn’t be able to make it back for the game.
“Did he say where he was calling from?” Lucas said.
“He did not,” she said.
“Did he say when he might be back?” Lucas said.
She shook her head. “So you and your mom still haven’t spoken to him?”
Now Lucas shook his head. “Have the people on the board decided what to do about him when he does come back, if he does?”
“Nothing has changed,” she said. “They want to talk to him before they make up their minds.”
They were ten minutes from the start of their game against the Harkness Pelicans. Lucas had just taken his last warm-up shot, making one last three-pointer before he came over to the bench. The rest of the guys were still out there, including Ryan, who was at least talking to Lucas for the first time in over a week. Lucas could still feel some attitude from him. But they had a game to play. And to win.
Mrs. Moretti came over and sat down next to Lucas as he drank some Gatorade.
“I need you to be my assistant coach today,” she said.
“You don’t need me to do anything but play,” he said.
She grinned. “I need a little more than that,” she said. “Nobody knows this team better than you do, maybe with the exception of the coach who’s not here today.”
“You’re here,” Lucas said. “You got this.”
“They used to call me a coach on the floor back in the day,” she said. “But it’s different when you’re out there. So you see anything today you think we should be doing, you tell me, okay?”
Lucas grinned and bumped her some fist.
When Ryan got back to the bench he said, “What was all that between you and my mom?”
“She was just making me promise to throw you the ball every chance I get,” Lucas said.
“She’s always telling me she has a brilliant basketball mind,” Ryan said. “That’s just more proof of it.”
Lucas nodded at him. “We good?” he said.
Ryan made a gesture with his hand that seemed to take in the whole gym, or maybe the day.
“We’re always good in here,” he said.
The Pelicans were the smallest team, across the board, they’d played all season. The Wolves had a size advantage at every single position, including point guard, where Lucas would be lined up against another kid he’d been playing against since fifth grade, Jamie Alderman. Jamie was at least a head shorter than Lucas. Maybe more than that. But Lucas knew there wasn’t a quicker guard in the league, or a slicker handler of the ball. Lucas was proud of his own ability with the ball.
He also knew this about Jamie:
He had never thought being the smallest kid on the court was any kind of disadvantage.
“This is gonna be weird,” Ryan said, right before it was time for him to inbound the ball to Lucas to start the game.
“Now that your mom is head coach?” Lucas said.
“Uh, yeah,” Ryan said.
“We’re fine,” Lucas said, knowing he sounded like Gramps.
This time it was the Wolves jumping off to an early lead. As quick as Jamie was, he still couldn’t manage to stay in front of Lucas on defense. And this week, Lucas was able to shoot over somebody the way Corey had been shooting over him in their last game. On top of all that, their pick-and-roll offense was working as well as it had all season. Today Lucas was the one getting the most open looks.
Sharif came out hot, too. Billy and Richard were controlling the boards. The Wolves were ahead by eight at the end of the first quarter, but Lucas thought they should have been ahead by more.
Mrs. Moretti gave him a quick rest at the start of the second quarter, replacing him with Neil. But the Wolves increased their lead with Lucas sitting right next to Ryan’s mom on their bench.
“This might be the best Neil has looked all season,” Mrs. Moretti said. “I don’t want to ice you. But I’m thinking about leaving him in there.”
“Your assistant coach for the day agrees with you,” Lucas said.
When Lucas did get back in there, the Wolves increased their lead to twelve. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself, he was big on staying in the moment, but he couldn’t help but think that if they won today, they would already qualify for the championship game. Even if they lost one of their last regular-season games, they’d still only have one loss. The worst they could do was tie the Jazz for best record. And if they did end up tied, the Wolves would get home court in the championship game, because they’d beaten the Jazz.
But Lucas wanted to win them all. He’d come into the season thinking they could win all their games, even if he hadn’t said that to Gramps or Ryan or anybody. Now, after everything that had happened, if they did win them all it was going to feel all that much sweeter, at least to him. Even if Gramps didn’t get to share in the championship.
How would I feel about that, really?
How would I feel if Gramps didn’t get to finish the season?
He shook his head, as if to keep his brain from wandering away from the task at hand.
Focus on winning the game today.
So much had changed across the season, but not that.
Mrs. Moretti went with their starters when it was time to start the second half. Before they went back out, she turned to Lucas and said, “Any words of wisdom from my assistant?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Pedal to the metal.”
“That’s what my college coach always used to tell us,” she said, “when he wasn’t telling us to get our butts back on defense.”
“More words of wisdom,” Lucas said.
But then Ryan, who’d told Lucas before the game that things were going to feel weird today, was the one who turned weird. They were still leading by twelve, but Ryan acted as if the game had already turned into a blowout, and he didn’t have to take the rest of it seriously.
Lucas knew how much his friend wanted to win, in basketball or tennis or anything else. But now he was goofing around, trying to show off, maybe because he thought he could get away with it with his mom coaching, even though he should have known better than that. And been better than that.
It was still happening. Lucas remembered a game earlier in the season when Liam’s dad had asked Gramps why he thought his son had played so badly after doing so well the game before. Gramps had grinned and said, “Maybe because he’s twelve?”
Only, Ryan was acting like a six-year-old, firing up shots from the outside, taking his time getting his own butt back on defense after he missed another shot. When he did get back into position, the guy he was supposed to be guarding—Alex Faried—was the one making shots, inside and outside.
Lucas thought about what Mike Breen had said that time, about how hard it was to turn momentum around. But suddenly the Pelicans were on a 12–2 rip. By the time Mrs. Moretti got Ryan out of there, it was a game again. A real one.
Lucas looked over to the bench and saw Mrs. Moretti giving her son a pretty good talking-to, even though he couldn’t hear a word of what she was saying. But what he hoped she was saying was this:
Cut. It. Out.
Now.
The whole energy of the game had changed completely by then. If you had just gotten to the gym at the start of the second half, you would have thought for sure that the Pelicans—who had come into the game with three losses—were the top team in the league. They were no longer chasing the Wolves. The Wolves were chasing them.
The game was tied going into the fourth quarter. Mrs. Moretti put Ryan back into the game, but he still wasn’t doing much on offense, good or bad. Sharif got hot all over again. Lucas posted up Jamie a couple t
imes, and scored over him.
Really, their problem wasn’t on offense. The problem was at the other end. Even though the Wolves had picked it up again on offense, Ryan still couldn’t do a thing with Alex Faried. Alex was still getting to his favorite spots on the court. He was still getting to the basket when Ryan would come out and try to take his outside shot away. And when the Pelicans got out on the fast break, Alex was beating Ryan down the court.
With three minutes left, the Wolves were losing by five points when Mrs. Moretti elected to call their last time-out. Lucas looked over at Ryan in the huddle. His face was red, the way it would get sometimes when he was angry.
Before his mom could give them any instructions Ryan said, “Mom, I can’t cover that guy. You have to let somebody else try, or I’m going to lose the game all by myself.”
Mrs. Moretti didn’t answer him right away.
Lucas did.
“No,” he said.
He looked at Mrs. Moretti. She offered a nod of the head that perhaps only Lucas noticed.
You asked me to be your assistant coach, Lucas thought. Well, here goes nothing.
Lucas turned to look right at Ryan.
“If your mom takes you off Alex,” he said, “she might as well just take you out of the game.”
He knew exactly who he sounded like. He was basically using the same words that Gramps had used when Lucas was the one trying to beg off from guarding Corey.
Ryan’s face got redder. He was breathing hard, as if the game has already started back up. But he didn’t say anything. Lucas knew they didn’t have much time left in the huddle, so he got right to it.
“Do you want to quit?” he said to his best friend.
“No,” Ryan said.
Lucas took a step closer to him. Ryan was taller, but he felt in that moment as if they were nose-to-nose.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You did the most to get us into this mess,” Lucas said. “Now you’re going to get us out. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Lucas turned and led the team back on the court. Before the ball was in play, he took one last look back at Mrs. Moretti, who smiled and shook a fist at him.
Ryan didn’t quit. Nobody did. Lucas and Ryan ran a sweet pick-and-roll, the kind they’d been running all season. When Ryan got away from Alex, Lucas hit him with an even sweeter bounce pass. Ryan made the layup. At the other end the Pelicans tried to run some clock. They finally swung the ball to Alex, who stepped back from Ryan, creating space, probably sure he was going to hit one more jumper. But Ryan timed his move at him perfectly, moved in on him without fouling him, and blocked the shot cleanly.
And he didn’t just block it, he directed the ball to Lucas, who fed the ball up the court to Billy. But instead of driving the ball, he stopped and kicked the ball out to Sharif, who hit a wide-open three.
The game was tied.
Maybe this game was different. Maybe this time they had managed to turn the ocean liner back around.
Ryan got another stop against Alex. Richard made a short jumper for the Wolves. They were back ahead by a basket. Ryan managed to bottle up Alex in the corner. Lucas ran in there to double-team, stole the ball cleanly. Ryan took off. Lucas got himself out of traffic, threw the ball as far as he could, watched Ryan catch it in stride, and drive the rest of the way for a layup.
The Wolves were ahead by four. They ended up winning by four. After the horn sounded, Ryan made his way straight for Lucas, putting out his hand for a regulation handshake.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re the one who made most of the plays,” Lucas said.
“I meant thank you for being my friend,” Ryan said.
Before they left the gym, Lucas asked Ryan if he wanted to hang out later, feeling as if things were finally back to normal between them. Ryan said he couldn’t even though he wanted to, he had schoolwork to do.
“Wait,” Lucas said. “It’s the end of break. Nobody has any work to do.”
“Well, I do,” Ryan said.
“Work on what?” Lucas said, but Ryan was already hustling to catch up with his mom.
Mr. Collins passed back their papers on Monday. Lucas was pleased to discover that he’d gotten an A. But that wasn’t the shocker in English. The big news of the day was that Ryan Moretti had also gotten an A.
The bigger shocker was that Ryan had thrown out his old paper and picked a new subject, even at the last minute. He hadn’t written about Mr. Nichols, his tennis coach. He’d written about Lucas, and how hard it was sometimes to understand what it took to be a good friend, and to count on your friends.
“When our game was over on Saturday,” Ryan said, “I went home and e-mailed Mr. Collins and asked if I could add one more thing to my paper. That’s the schoolwork I was talking about. He e-mailed me back and told me to go for it. So I wrote about what had happened in the fourth quarter against the Pelicans, and how I learned even more about friendship when I least expected it.”
“Wow,” Lucas said, because that’s all he could think of to say.
“You got me to stop acting like an idiot,” Ryan said. “It just happened in a game this time.”
“But you came up with an awesome ending,” Lucas said. “For our game and for your paper.” Ryan shrugged.
“Isn’t that what good writers are supposed to do?” he said.
Then he laughed. They both did.
THIRTY-TWO
They finished their regular season without losing a game, even if they had managed to lose their head coach along the way.
Gramps still wasn’t back, and they still hadn’t heard from him. Almost every day, Lucas asked his mom if they should be worried about him, now that he felt as if anger toward his grandfather had been replaced by concern.
His mom said no.
“He might be wounded by everything that has happened,” she said. “And he is an elderly man. But he is still the toughest old bird I’ve ever met in my life. He’ll just show up one of these days, and when he does, I believe he’ll tell us where he’s been and what he did, and why.”
It was the Monday of what Lucas and Ryan and the guys were calling Championship Week, the way ESPN did when everybody was getting ready for the NCAA Tournament. On Saturday they were playing Corey Tanner and the Jazz for the title at Claremont Middle. Lucas knew there had been some talk about moving the game to the bigger gym at Claremont High School. But when Mrs. Moretti asked Lucas and his teammates what they thought, they were unanimous in telling her that they wanted to play the game where they’d played their other home games this season.
“We earned home court,” Lucas said. “And we want to stay on our home court.”
This was before practice on Monday night. Their last practice before the Jefferson game would be on Thursday night.
On Tuesday night, just as Lucas’s mom had predicted, Gramps just showed up right before dinner.
And proceeded to tell them where he’d been, and what he’d been doing.
And why.
* * *
He was wearing his old Celtics cap, but took it off when it was time to sit down and eat turkey meatloaf. It was then that Lucas discovered that Gramps had called his mom that afternoon to tell him he was back, and hoped he could still invite himself over for dinner.
She had reminded him that no invitation was required, now or ever, and that she was going to let him surprise Lucas.
“He’s been worried about you,” Lucas’s mom told him.
“In the whole crazy scheme of things,” he’d said, “I think that might actually be a good thing for me, if not for him.”
Julia told him she agreed.
Lucas asked him where he’d been.
“I went out to California to sit with Tommy Angelo before he died,” Gramps said.
“So he’s gone?” Lucas’s mom said.
“He is,” Gramps said. “You know how sometimes they say it’s a blessing when somebody
passes? In his case, I believe it was, just because there wasn’t a whole lot of Tommy left by the time I got with him.”
The two of them hadn’t exchanged a single word or correspondence, he said, since Gramps had changed his name and left California for the East Coast.
“In that story in the paper, he talked about how we never forgave him,” Gramps said now. “Well, I never knew he wanted forgiving. He was just part of the life I’d left behind me.”
“Did he recognize you?” Lucas said.
“I’m not sure he would have on his own,” Gramps said. “But the first day when his wife brought me into his room, she said, ‘An old friend is here to see you.’ Then I pulled up a chair next to him and took his hand in mine and said, ‘It’s me. It’s Joe.’ I hadn’t called myself that in sixty years.”
Lucas’s mom said, “In the newspaper it sounded like his memory wasn’t very good.”
“Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t,” Gramps said. “He’d fade in and out. But the gaps he had, and some of them were pretty big ones, I’d try to fill in for him. I told him we didn’t need to talk about all that happened. But he wanted to, with me helping him along. It was important to him that I know how sorry he was about what happened.”
Gramps sighed. “But you know what ended up happening? We ended up talking more about the good times we had before those bad ones.”
Lucas’s mom smiled. “You’re the one who’s always said that one good memory in sports wipes out a whole boatload of bad ones.”
“Sometimes we’d just sit there for a long while and neither one of us would say anything,” Gramps said. “And you know what I got to thinking about in the quiet of that room? If all of it hadn’t happened, even the way it did, then I really wouldn’t have had the life I’ve had. I probably never would have met your grandmother, son. We wouldn’t have had your dad, even if we didn’t have him nearly long enough. And I never would have been blessed enough to have your mom in my life.”