to my pseudo-daughter was merely the start of something new.
9
THE DAY MY DAD left had started pretty well. It would go down from there for a few hours, then up again for, oh, about a couple decades. Trey and I followed the smell of bacon frying to the kitchen and observed our usual rituals of breakfast in pj’s, doing dishes to the Beatles, and getting dressed to the smell of the lawn being cut. It was a day that felt cheerful—kelly-green around the edges—and that somehow brought out the sports fans in us. So Trey donned his lucky Bulls championship cap, and I donned my lucky McDonald’s Walk for Life T-shirt, which always felt disloyal to Wendy’s. But I was getting over that.
I think it’s the sports theme that dismantled our lives. That may explain the hate-hate relationship I’ve had with sports ever since then, though I’m pretty sure I was already of that mind-set in preschool, when I staged a sit-in every time my teacher told us to climb the monkey bars. Monkey bars was a deceptive term. Monkey sounded like fun, in a goofy, screechy kinda way. And bars sounded yummy, in a Mars or Snickers kinda way. But climbing? Climbing sounded like something that required physical effort, and that’s where five-year-old Shelby drew the line.
Trey and I wandered outside in our sports gear, and Dad told us he was going to the hardware store to have his lawn-mower blade sharpened. He took Mom’s car since it was parked behind his and she wouldn’t be needing it as she had walked to the hair salon to have her ends trimmed. We stood in the driveway after Dad drove away and had our usual Saturday conversation.
“What do you wanna do?”
“I dunno. What do you wanna do?”
“I dunno. We could go to the arcade.”
“Yeah.”
“Or we could watch MTV.”
I didn’t like MTV. It made me feel like I’d drunk too much Coke. “Or we could go to the grocery store and try their free samples.”
Trey and I weren’t very good at Saturdays. We could never decide what we were going to do—except when Dad had one of his fits. When that happened, life became predictable and manageable and we no longer had to plan our day or come to an agreement. We knew the drill. It took all the frustration out of Saturdays. But Dad had been in a pretty good mood so far, so we were left to our own devices.
Why Trey stayed home on weekends with little old me was a mystery. He had friends on the soccer team and at school, though he mostly just hung out with them between classes and during games and scrimmages. They never came over to the house, but I think that’s because it was too hard to explain my dad to them. And not just the neckties-on-Saturdays thing.
We were about to throw in the towel and head to the video arcade when the sport of basketball decided to turn our lives upside down. See, Trey had his Bulls cap on, and when he was wearing that, he tended to suffer from Michael Jordan delusions. I saw him eyeing the basketball hoop that hung above our garage door and concluded I’d have to find my own entertainment for the next hour or so while my usually fairly rational brother bounced a ball in rhythmic monotony and yelled, “Three-pointer!” at the top of his lungs. I did, however, see an impediment to his plans.
“Don’t you think Dad’s car is too close to the hoop?” I asked.
“I’ll shoot around it.”
“Trey . . .” Dad loved his car. The first deadly sin in our household was messing with Dad’s car. The second deadly sin was everything else.
“Don’t worry about it, Shell.” He was already bouncing the ball and lining up his first shot. “I’ve got all the precision of my man Jordan.”
He had neither the skin color nor the height, so I doubted he had the precision. The first shot went wide and bounced off the backboard directly onto the shiny hood of Dad’s Chevy. I cringed and covered my eyes like it would undo the hollow thunk that I knew must have left its mark on the finish.
“It’s okay,” Trey said a few seconds later, and I uncovered my eyes to find him polishing a blemish off the hood with his shirt. “It’s coming right off.”
“Maybe it’s a bad idea to pretend you’re a Bull while the car’s in the driveway,” I suggested. He got