Luis set the ladder aside and walked the length of the driveway, looking up at the backboard from the street the way a neighbor would see it. He squinted against the sun and nodded, as if he were checking his own first impression against a second one.
Angela asked the question Malik had been turning over in his own mind. "If we fix it, does it stay fixed? Or does the crack come back the first time a storm hits?"
Luis considered that honestly, which Malik appreciated. "The seal holds the line where it is. It doesn't make the board new, and I won't tell you it does. What it does is keep water out of the crack so it doesn't travel. With the rim treated and a new net, you've got a hoop that's cared for. That's what the assessment says, and that's what I'd stand behind."
He broke the price down on the back of his note, in the same block letters: a new net, treatment for the rim and bolts, sealant for the backboard, and the labor for one visit. The figures added to two hundred and ten dollars, no more and no less, and he underlined the total twice.
"Can you hold that price?" Angela asked.
Luis nodded. "Thirty days. In writing, on the same page. You call me when you're ready, and I'll come back with the net in the truck."
As he packed his tools, Malik picked up the basketball from where it rested against the garage wall. He did not shoot. He just held it, feeling the familiar grip, while Luis's truck backed out of the driveway and the street settled back into its Saturday quiet.
Angela folded the letter carefully and thanked Luis. She stood in the driveway a moment longer, the paper held against her chest like something she did not want the wind to take.
That night Angela spread the household budget across the kitchen table. It was not a dramatic gesture. She did it the way she did everything with money: quietly, after a long shift, with a pencil and a lined notebook whose pages were already full of careful subtractions.
Malik sat across from her, not because she had asked him to, but because he wanted to see the numbers himself. The mortgage was first, as always. Then groceries, then the electric bill, then the school costs that seemed small separately and large together: fees, shoes that wore out too fast, a calculator that had cost more than she had expected.
She wrote the repair figure at the bottom of the page and circled it. Two hundred and ten dollars.
"It's not nothing," she said. "But it's not impossible either."
She worked through it aloud, not to lecture him but to think. If she picked up one extra Saturday shift at the medical office next month, and if they kept groceries tight for two weeks, her half of the repair would be covered without touching the mortgage or the money set aside for his school fees. It would be tight. It would mean no extra spending, no easy week. But it would not mean choosing between the hoop and keeping the house running.
Malik did the other half in his head before she said it. One hundred and five dollars. That was his share, and he already knew where it would come from, though the job had only just begun. He did not say so yet. He wanted her to finish her math first.
What she did not write down, and what they both understood without saying, was the fine. Twenty-five dollars a day. It was still running, a quiet number adding itself up in the background while they talked about groceries and shifts. Angela did not pretend it was not there. She simply refused to let it decide the order of things.
"We don't pay a fine to make a problem go away when the problem isn't real," she said, tapping Luis's letter where it lay beside the notebook. "We fix what's actually broken. The net. The rim. The seal. That's honest work, and it's a fair price."
Malik nodded. He thought about the way his mother had priced this repair twice before, and how both times something else had come first: a car repair, a school bill, a month when the hours at work had been short. This time was different, not because the money had suddenly appeared, but because the choice was finally clear. The hoop was not a luxury she was putting off. It was a fixture with a written assessment, a price, and a plan.
She closed the notebook and slid Luis's letter into the drawer where she kept the important papers. "We'll get there," she said. "One piece at a time."