Caleb watched from the porch. Marcus knew he was there without turning; two evenings of a father watching a son stand in an empty driveway had made its own quiet language between them. Caleb did not call him in. He did not offer advice with his hands on his hips like a coach in a film. He let the street be empty around his son for as long as his son needed to see that it was.
At last Marcus said, to the hoop, to the house, "They're not coming back, are they. The guys. I mean the kids."
"Give it time," Caleb said.
"You always say that like time does the work."
"No," Caleb said. "People do the work. Time is just where they have to stand while they do it."
The chain ticked against the rim. Down the street a door opened and closed quickly, someone taking in a package, and the sound carried in the new, careful quiet of the cul-de-sac, and Marcus thought about fear not as a scream but as a schedule β earlier dinners, shorter watering, kids kept in on fine evenings β and how easily a whole street could be taught to arrange itself around a thing nobody named.
Caleb came down the porch steps then and stood beside him, not close, looking up the street the way Marcus was. His jaw had mostly healed. His hands were empty.
"Tomorrow," Caleb said, "we'll see."
Marcus did not ask what that meant. He had learned, in a week that had taught him more about his father than sixteen years had, that some of Caleb's sentences were doors he opened only once he was already walking through them.
Caleb set the box down in the middle of the driveway at five o'clock on the third evening, and left it there.
It was a new basketball, still boxed, the cardboard bright with a picture of the ball that was inside it β orange, pebbled, unshot, unshot-at. He placed it the way another father might place a casserole on a sick neighbor's porch: squarely, without ceremony, exactly where it could not be missed by anyone coming down the driveway, and then he went and sat on the porch steps with a glass of water and the paper he was not reading.
Marcus, watching from the doorway, said, "That's it? That's the plan?"
"Nobody owes the hoop a speech," Caleb said. "Just play if you want."
He said it loud enough for the driveway, not loud enough for the street. It was not an invitation he intended to repeat. Marcus understood that this, too, was the point. A speech would have made the hoop into a symbol, and symbols were what men in suits dealt in. A ball in a box was only a ball in a box, sitting in good light on a fine evening, waiting to see whether anyone still wanted it.
Jamal came first, because Jamal lived close enough to have seen the box from his front yard and because being sixteen and furious on behalf of your little brother can look, from a distance, a lot like courage. He walked up the driveway with his hands in his pockets and Eli nowhere in sight β Eli's absence, negotiated by parents, respected by Jamal β and he studied the box like it might be evidence.
"Your dad bought a ball," he said.
"My dad bought a ball," Marcus agreed.
Jamal looked up at the hoop. He looked at the porch, where Caleb turned a page he had not read. He looked at Marcus, and something in his face, tight for two days, made its decision.
"Is it bulletproof?" he called out.
"No," Caleb said, without looking up. "But my patience is shorter now."
It landed the way it was meant to. Jamal laughed β startled, too loud, real β and Marcus laughed with him before he knew he was going to, and the sound went up the empty driveway and hit the backboard and came back changed. It was the first real laugh any of them had managed since the shot. It did not fix anything. It did something better and smaller: it proved that the driveway could still hold a sound that was not a gunshot or a siren or a reporter's question, and that the boys could still make it themselves.
From the porch steps, Ava rolled her eyes with the full, professional contempt of a twelve-year-old for the humor of older males. She had an ice bag balanced on the planter-bruised shin, propped on the rail, and her homework open upside down on her lap, and the eye-roll was, Marcus thought, her own way of playing. She was there. That counted. She had taken her usual place on the steps of her own accord, earbuds around her neck this time, not in her ears.
"Open it, then," Jamal said.
Marcus tore the box. The ball smelled of new rubber. It needed no pumping; it bounced true on the first drop, a clean, ordinary, beautiful sound β leather's cousin against concrete, the sound the whole street had been built, in some sense, to hear at six in the evening. Jamal caught it on the second bounce and held it a moment, both hands, the way you hold something returned.
"Your court," he said, and tossed it to Marcus.
Marcus took the first shot badly. His shoulder, where a ringed hand had closed on it a week before, remembered things his mind was trying to file elsewhere, and the ball clanged off the side of the rim and skipped toward the street. Jamal retrieved it without comment, which was its own kind of friendship, and shot just as badly, and for a moment they were simply two boys who had forgotten how, in a driveway that expected better of them. The third shot went in. Neither of them celebrated it. They just kept the rotation going β shoot, rebound, pass β until the rhythm, older than the week, older than fear, came back into their hands the way a song comes back after the verse you thought you had lost.