Malik saw it from the driveway and stopped mid-dribble. David Cole got out of the driver's side and Marcus Reed out of the passenger side, and Reed was carrying a pie dish with both hands, held level like an offering, and Angela came out onto the porch and laughed before anyone had said a word.
"Your mother told me you like peach pie," Reed said to Malik, in the driveway, as if no time had passed at all and this were the most natural sentence in the world.
Malik took the dish from him carefully. It was still warm through the cloth.
"You remembered," he said.
"Of course," Reed said, and something in the simplicity of it went through Malik like a hand on his shoulder. "You think a man forgets a thing like that? Pie intelligence is the first thing they teach us."
They ate on the porch after dinner because the evening was too fine to waste indoors, and the stories came the way they had come the first night. David Cole told the story of Marcus Johnson fixing a generator in the dark overseas with a flashlight in his teeth and profanity in three registers. Reed told about the letter Marcus had made them all write home before a hard month, and how Marcus had read his own letter aloud to nobody outside the wire, and come back in with his mind settled.
Malik listened with the pie going cold on his plate in front of him and did not care. At a pause, in the blue hour when the court's lamps were thinking about coming on, he asked the question that had been sitting underneath all the stories since the first night.
"Why didn't Dad tell me those stories?" he said. "About the war. About saving you." He looked at Reed. "He never told us any of it. Not once. He just fixed sinks and taught me to shoot."
David Cole turned his glass in his hands and answered with the care of a man handing over something fragile.
"Because your father didn't think those things made him special," David said. "That is the honest answer, Malik. He thought they were just what you did. You were there, so you did it. He would have been embarrassed by half of what we have told you tonight, and he would have changed the subject to your mother's cooking."
"It is," Reed said to Angela, with his fork raised, and they all laughed, and the laugh loosened something in Malik's chest that had been tight since October.
"So what was he most interested in?" Malik asked. "Out there. If it was not any of that, medals and all. What did he care about?"
Reed did not have to think. Neither, it was clear, did David, but Reed was the one who answered, and he answered the way a man answers who has been waiting years to be asked the right question by the right person.
"Getting everyone home," Reed said. "That was it. That was the whole list. Your dad was not interested in being the bravest man in the room or the one they wrote up afterward. He was interested in the room being full at the end of the night. Every plan he ever argued for, every risk he ever talked anybody out of, every time he went back out into something bad, it was that. Get everyone home." He looked at Malik across the porch rail, at the boy sitting in his dead friend's house, in his dead friend's neighborhood, in the life the man had built out of exactly that creed. "He got us home, Malik. He just did not get to stay. There is a difference, and the difference is not fair, and nobody who was there will ever tell you it is. But what he was interested in, he did. All the way."
The lamps came on down the court, one by one. Angela reached over without looking and found Malik's hand, and nobody said anything for a while, and the silence was full rather than empty.
Later, as the light went the color of the peaches in the pie, Malik went down to the driveway as always, and the two men and his mother stayed on the porch, and the ball made its sound against the pavement, once, twice, settling into the rhythm everyone on Brier View Court knew by heart now.
A little boy of about seven had stopped at the edge of the sidewalk.
He was new to the court, or new enough, standing with the seriousness of a small boy who has calculated risks, watching the ball rise and fall. Malik caught the ball off the rim and held it, and looked at him, and remembered being that size in this same light, with his father's hands on his shoulders, adjusting his feet.
"You want to try?" Malik said.
The boy nodded, once, gravely, like a man accepting a mission.