Horse

A fully inflated basketball weighs about twenty-two ounces, give or take, with a circumference of around 29 inches. The air inside, measured in pounds per square inch, is what makes it bounce.

            That said, how could this saffron ball, with its black lines and smooth dimples and blocky Wilson logo, feel so heavy to Jimmy, almost as if it was a boulder? 

            The ball wasn’t any different than any of the others laying around the Barton School gym, twilight beginning to stream through the plate-glass windows in its upper rafters.

             Jimmy stared at the hoop from the three-point line, which felt about a mile away. Kay-Kay, dressed in a cardinal Barton Lady Barons hoodie with cream lettering, stood beneath it, hands on her hips.

            “You gonna shoot?” she said.

            Jimmy didn’t respond initially, instead ruminating on what it would normally take to sink a three-pointer. According to Creighton University researchers, an arc of forty-five degrees and a speed of less than twenty miles per hour, with two revolutions a second of spin would do the job. He knew this because he looked it up one time to illustrate a point to his boys’ varsity team in practice. 

            Today, Jimmy could barely lift the ball over his head, much less position his arms and his right wrist optimally.

            “You know, you can’t run forever,” Kay-Kay said.

            There. The topic was out now, spilling onto the blond hardwood floor. 

            The pregnancy of a girl he barely knew a lifetime ago, hundreds of miles away in southern Illinois, the region they call Little Egypt.

            The recently deceased son he never knew. Never wanted any part of.

            Suicide. Cyberbullying.

            That was then. This is now, this is here, in the Chicago suburbs.

            Jimmy tucked the ball under his right arm. It still felt like a medicine ball.

            “Sure I can,” he replied. “It’s all garbage. It was just a big mistake way back when.”

            Kay-Kay’s lip gloss gleamed under the jaundiced gym lights. She wiped a stray hair from her eye.

            “God doesn’t make mistakes,” she said quietly. “God doesn’t make garbage.”

            Jimmy bounced the ball once and tucked it under his arm again.

            “Want to play horse?” he said.

            “Will you talk to me?”

            “Maybe.”

            Jimmy lofted a three-pointer from the right arc that sailed under the hoop, barely catching any net. Jimmy estimated the arc was about thirty degrees, but the ball was really heavy today. 

            The ball bounced off the black protective padding on the wall, the one with the cartoonish red baron, complete with a pencil-thin moustache and pilot goggles, right to Kay-Kay. She dribbled it to the right arc, placed the toes of her pristine white Nikes right in front of the three-point line and coolly sank her shot. Now that was at least forty-five degrees with plenty of revolutions, Jimmy thought.

            “H,” she said. “You know, you could go down there. See her, find out what happened after you left. Maybe that would give you some peace of mind.”

            Kay-Kay dribbled from the three-point line to the lane, then stopped and popped.

            Good.

            “What do I have to gain by dredging all that up?” Jimmy said, prior to throwing up a jumper that looked more like a grenade than a basketball. It caromed off the right side of the rim and bounded away.

            Kay-Kay retrieved the ball and stood right under the hoop.

            “Here, I’ll make it easy for you,” she said.

            One bounce, high off the glass backboard. Nothing but net.

            This time, Jimmy positioned himself in that same spot and attempted a layup that rolled around the rim but fell out.

            “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered.

            Kay-Kay scooped up the ball but didn’t shoot.

            “O,” she said. “Jimmy, what happened, for real?”

            “I honestly don’t know. All I got was a really pissed off text last week saying that my son was dead.”

            “That’s not a lot to go on.”

            Kay-Kay sank another layup.

            “Exactly,” Jimmy said, attempting his in kind.

            That one bounced off the glass and lipped over the edge of the rim.

            Unbelievable.

            “R,” she said. “What do you know about mom?”

            “She was just some girl I met at a bar,” he said. “Her name was Trina. I don’t remember much about that night, except that it was really cold and we won a big conference game.”

            “Southern Illini Junior College, right?”

            “Yep. The one in wonderful Preston County.”

            “When did you find out she was pregnant?”

            The word “pregnant” seemed to add a whole new layer of perturbation for Jimmy.

            Pregnant. He could hear Pops.

            “You’re responsible for this, boy,” he would have said, teeth gritted.

            He’d been gone for five years and yet his hold over Jimmy was still palpable.

            Kay-Kay seemed to sense the effect the word had on Jimmy, too, but shot anyway, a baseline jumper that curled the rim and fell through, almost back to her.

            She lofted the ball to Jimmy, who stood erect and shot without leaving his feet, making a show of flicking his right wrist to propel the ball in the direction of the goal. Predictably, the ball sailed wide left of the mark, and he swore under his breath. Kay-Kay was a churchgoing girl and didn’t appreciate blue language. Around her neck she wore a 24-inch gold chain with a cross that had been her father’s. He had died around the time Jimmy first started coaching at the Barton School. They had been very close, like many a father and daughter, and as Jimmy recalled, her old man had been a minister or a deacon, someone with some church authority. But what denomination, he didn’t know.

            The old man. Had that whole episode with Trina made Jimmy an old man?

            Kay-Kay materialized next to him. 

            “S,” she said, on the verge of winning. But she wasn’t smiling. 

            “It was later that spring, maybe March or early April,” he said. “She texted me to find out if we could meet. So I went to her apartment, which was above the bar off campus where we had met. I thought it was a little weird she didn’t want to meet in a public place, like the University Commons or something like that.”

            He stopped for a moment, but Kay-Kay gave him an imploring look.

            “What was your immediate reaction?” she said.

            “My first thought was she should get a paternity test,” Jimmy said. At this, Kay-Kay frowned.

            “Look, you have to understand, back then, things were different,” he went on. “I was on my way D-one, and then, possibly, hopefully, maybe onto the NBA.”

            “So you up and left?” 

            This was spoken by Kay-Kay not necessarily in an accusatory tone, but certainly questioning. She dribbled the ball to the top of the key, just inside the three-point line, but before she shot, she had another question.

            “Why did you run, really? Because it sounds like you still are. Running, that is.”

            Rebuke was red for Jimmy, like the Barons’ school colors, or a Stop sign, or even blushing when one was embarrassed.

            When he didn’t immediately answer, Kay-Kay lofted a jumper that appeared to be wide left of the mark. She orbited her hips and her head right, as if willing the shot to fall.

            “Eeee-yahh!” she blurted, echoing throughout the gym.

            It did indeed fall and the ball bounced three times under the basket before rolling and coming to a complete stop about five feet from Jimmy’s right foot.

            He thought of the word “pregnant” again, and Pops, how he never would have understood. Trina would have been a Jezebel that was interfering with the Lord’s master plan of putting Jimmy in the NBA and proselytizing on His behalf to a world that was on a swift track to hell.

            How many souls will be saved by your obedience? Pops had said.

            There had been two-plus weeks before the end of that semester, and he had spent those finalizing his transfer to mid-major East Beach State in Lester, Florida, another one-horse town, only a couple of miles from the white sands and azure waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

            The literal day the semester ended, he was on I-57, back to Chicago.

            That was the day he started running, he realized.

            He had received, but ignored, communications from several reasonably high-major schools trying to gauge his forthcoming plans. But none were from the big boys, Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, UConn and the like. Had they somehow found out about his indiscretion?

            “How did you tell her you were leaving?” Kay-Kay said.

            “I just said, I had a real shot to make it to the NBA,” he said, “and that I…”

            He stopped here and put his head down.

            “…that I didn’t need something from my past holding me back.”

            Those words that consisted of his recounting the story now struck him as crass, soiled.

            Kay-Kay folded her hands in front of her.

            “Did you talk about—abortion?”

            “It never came up. There wasn’t time. I figured the ball was in her court, pardon the pun.”

            Jimmy picked up the ball, dribbled it twice to the same spot inside the top of the key and stopped.

            “What would you have me do?” he said, this time making eye contact with Kay-Kay.

            “Only you can decide what to do.”

            “I choose to do nothing.”

            “Good luck with that.”

            “What’s that supposed to mean”

            Kay-Kay took two steps toward him and stopped, right about where the cardinal trim of the lane began.

            “What’s the best way to break a zone defense?” she said.

            “What does that have to do—” 

            “Just hear me out, please. What’s the best way to break a zone defense?”

            The question is beneath me, Jimmy thought. 

            “You can shoot over a zone,” he said, “but without a shot clock here in Illinois, I prefer passing on the perimeter until the defense makes a mistake, then you pound the ball inside. That gives you a good chance for an easy layup, backdoor or otherwise.”

            “The point is to put the ball in the hoop, no matter the defensive setup,” she replied. “That’s the important part.”

            “Right.”

            “What you’re facing here, right now, in your own life, is a zone defense,” she went on. “It’s a challenge. It’s something that’s challenging you to be a better you. Sure, you could take your ball and go home, but that means you passed on doing something really noble. Not necessarily for her, or you, but for him. You honor him if you take the interest now that you didn’t back then.”

            Him. The boy.

            His son. His deceased son.

            “So what are you suggesting?” Jimmy said.

            “Find her to find him. Then give him what you still can.”

            Jimmy lifted the ball into shooting position as Kay-Kay continued.

            “By finding him, you’ll find the better part of yourself. Otherwise, you’ll run for the rest of your life, which adds no meaning to your existence.”

            Jimmy lofted a half-assed shot that bounced off the right side of the glass.

            “E,” Kay-Kay said flatly.

            Jimmy turned to her as the ball rolled into the far corner of the gym, a shadowy area near his Barton Barons black duffel bag with red trim.

            “So this is about him,” he finally said. “Not about her.”

            “It’s about all three of you,” she replied, “but you have to see the value. You have to hold on tight to the strands of a relationship…”

            “…I never had.”

            “But you still can. Don’t you see? There’s a part of you that I’d bet is pining for that little guy, wanting to defend him from the mean kids, wanting to help him become a man. You can only do that if you make effort to find him, through her.”

            Jimmy felt the pit of his stomach expand, then contract, then expand again. He swallowed hard.

            “She’s ignoring my calls and texts.”

            “That’s why you have to go back there. Literally. Physically.”

            “Confront her?”

            “Not confront,” Kay-Kay said. “Confrontation isn’t what I mean. It’s going there with the intention of meeting her on an even plain so you can find him, but also support her on some level. Remember, no one grieves like a mother.”

            Jimmy blinked back the beginnings of tears in the corners of his eyes.

            “But again,” she said, “you have to see the value to your life as a whole.”

            She paused and added, “He’s not really gone, just like my daddy’s not really gone. They both live on. You just have to find him, if you want to.”

            Now a tear was running down Jimmy’s face from each eye, hot rivulets of electricity.

            Kay-Kay walked over and put her arms around him. Jimmy sensed the remnants of a fruity perfume on her wrists and neck.

            The scent was a faint reminder of his past, that night with Trina so long ago.

            It was the same perfume.

            “Stop running,” she whispered. “Find her to find him.”

            She paused just as Jimmy replied, “Okay.”