David watched the boy a moment. "You're wondering how much of him you're supposed to be," he said, not unkindly. "Every son of a man like that wonders it. So hear it from us, because we'd know." He leaned forward. "You don't have to become your father to honor him. He would have been the first to tell you that, and the loudest."
It was 8:10 by the clock over the mantel when they finally rose, refusing a second round of coffee with the air of men rationing a good thing so it would keep. The flag stayed in its case on the table, and the photographs stayed, and the promises that were made on the porch were the unshowy kind: we will come back, we will bring the rest, there is more you should have. The gray sedan pulled away from the curb with its lights sweeping the court.
Across the street, on his own porch, Richard Whitmore stood with his mug gone cold in his hand and watched the two men walk out of the Johnson house. He did not wave. He did not look away. His smile, when it came, was small and cold and perfectly controlled, the smile of a man who has recalculated and found the new figures acceptable. Angela saw it from her doorway as she closed the door on the evening, and she put the lock in with a care that had nothing to do with locks.
That night Malik lay awake with the coin in his hand above the blanket, and the stories moved through him and met the older ones, the ones he owned himself, and braided together whether he willed it or not.
He had been nine the summer his father built the hoop, and the building of it had taken a full Saturday because Marcus Johnson did nothing at half measure that a child's eyes might be watching. Malik's job was bolts and the wrench box and holding the level bubble steady with a concentration that hurt. When the last bolt was torqued, Marcus had backed down the ladder and produced the ball from the garage as if from behind a curtain, and the lessons had begun in the heat, with the court's cicadas going like wires. Malik's first shots were catastrophes of enthusiasm, all arm, no arc, one rebounding off the backboard into Angela's tomatoes. He had felt the failure gather in his chest by the sixth miss, the hot private shame of a boy who wanted to be good at his father's thing. Marcus had crouched down to his eye level, unhurried. "You're fighting it," he said. "Don't fight the shot. Give it somewhere to go." He had set Malik's small hands on the ball again, elbow under, fingers spread on the seams. "And when you miss, and you will, you don't stand there and make it mean something. Then you get ten chances to learn. Count them. A shot you learn from isn't wasted, son. You don't let the result of one shot tell you everything about yourself." The tenth shot of that first evening had gone through the hoop so clean it barely found the net, and Marcus had whooped loud enough to bring Angela to the screen door, and had declared to the court at large that the franchise had been secured.
He had been ten when a boy at school, a classmate whose name Malik had long since let go of because his father had advised him, that same week, that some names you put down like heavy bags, had heard Malik telling another kid about his street, the big yards, the court with no through traffic. The boy had laughed with the confidence of a child repeating a sentence built by adults. "You don't live over there," he had said. "You probably live in the wrong neighborhood." And when Malik had said nothing, being ten and stunned at the architecture of it, the boy had shrugged, as if the matter were clerical. He had carried the sentence home in his chest like a swallowed stone, and at the kitchen table that night, Marcus had drawn it out of him by asking plainly and then waiting without fidgeting. Marcus had listened all the way to the end. Then he had said that some people decided about a person the way they decided about weather in a place they'd never been, off a picture somebody else had drawn for them, and that a boy's job was not to stand in the rain of it arguing. "You know where you live," Marcus had said. "You know whose son you are. Nobody gets to rezone you with a sentence, Malik. You hear me? Nobody." And Malik had heard him, and had believed him completely, which was why, at sixteen, the remembering of it could still find the exact tender place.