The Baller (18 page)

He shook his head. “Must be contagious. Haven’t seen Marlene in this cheery a mood in years either.”

“She should be. Eighty-one today. You didn’t look that good when you were her age.”

Grouper grumbled something.

“Where is the birthday girl? Day room?”

“I think her visitor took her back to her room a little while ago.”

“Visitor?”

“The one who was here a few days ago is back again. Brought Marlene a present, too.”

“What are you talking about? No one visits Marlene, except me.”

Grouper shrugged. “Thought you knew. Pretty girl with the biggest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. They wouldn’t have let her past security if she wasn’t on the approved list.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
The biggest big blue eyes I’ve ever seen.
I tore ass toward Marlene’s room. By the time I reached the door, my heart was beating like it was the first week of practice and I’d just run five miles in full pads.

Hearing her voice, I froze. Willow had moved from the Deep South to New York when she was ten, but she always kept a hint of her accent. The way she strung her words together was almost lyrical. It was something I’d always loved about her. I could lie with my head in her lap for hours, listening to her babble about all the things she wanted to see someday. But in that moment, as I stood on the other side of the door, the sound was worse than nails scraping down a blackboard.

I should have taken a moment to tamp down the anger boiling up within me, but I didn’t. I pushed the door open. Willow was sitting on Marlene’s bed, her back to me. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

At the sound of my voice, her head whipped around. Her naturally doe-eyed blues grew even wider.

Neither of us said a word. My chest burned. Swallowing acid would have been less painful than what looking at her again did to me after all these years.

Grouper must have heard me or sensed that something wasn’t right, because he was suddenly beside me. He took one look at my face, then at Willow, and squeezed between me and the doorway to get inside of the room.

“Okay, Birthday Girl. It’s time for physical therapy.” It was only one o’clock; physical therapy wasn’t until four. Luckily, most days, Marlene had no sense of time. Grouper maneuvered her wheelchair over and immediately began sitting her up in the bed. He wasn’t in bad shape, but I knew from experience it wasn’t easy getting her in and out of the chair. Typically a nurse and a porter did it together.

Ignoring the self-preservation that was keeping me standing in the hallway, I walked to the bed and lifted Marlene, setting her gently into her chair. She looked up at me. “Brody. I didn’t hear you come in. Did you come with Willow?”

I responded with a lie on autopilot, the same way I had been for years. “We came in separate cars today.”

She nodded. Grouper unlatched the lock on the chair and began to turn her toward the door. “Wait!” She held up her hand. “I need my teeth.”

I kissed Marlene’s forehead. “You have them in.”

She did the usual check, raising her hand and tapping her nail on her front tooth. What was it with those things? She never trusted that I was telling the truth about her teeth, yet she happily accepted the thousands of lies I’d been feeding her about her granddaughter for years. Sometimes we believe things not because we know they are true, but because the lies are easier to accept.

Grouper nodded to me as he wheeled Marlene from the room, clicking the door closed behind him.

I stared out the window for a long time. There was so much I wanted to yell at Willow, yet it was all knotted up in my throat, clogging the words. Eventually, she was the one who spoke.

“How have you been?” she asked in a soft voice.

I let out a sardonic laugh. “Just fucking great.”
This shit
was not happening. I turned to face her, leveling a death stare. “What do you want here, Willow?”

“What do you mean? I came to see my grandmother.”

“It’s been four goddamn years. Why now?”

She looked down at her wringing hands. “I missed her.”

“Bullshit. What do you need? Money?” I took my wallet out of my pocket and pulled the wad of cash from it, throwing at her on the bed. “I’ll save you the trouble of stealing it. Take it. And fucking leave. We’re fine without you.”

“You’ve been coming to see her every week all these years. I saw it on the visitor sign-in sheet.”

“Someone had to.”

She looked up at me. There were tears in her eyes. I had to look away. I was too fucking angry to let her manipulate me again. “I should have been here. Thank you for taking care of her for me.”

“I didn’t do it for you.” The air in the room was making it difficult to breathe. The windows didn’t open, and my lungs constricted, the pressure in my chest making it feel like it was about to explode. I needed to get the hell out of this place. Without bothering to say goodbye, I left the flowers and the gift I’d brought for Marlene’s birthday on the bed and headed to the door.

Her voice stopped me as I reached for the door handle. I didn’t turn around when she spoke.

“I’ve been clean for eleven months.”

“Good luck to you, Willow.” I never turned back.

Willow

“You knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

I pulled the last tissue out of the box that Dr. Kaplan kept on the glass coffee table between us. “Sorry.”

“I’m well stocked. Don’t worry about it.” She gave me the same encouraging smile I’d grown to become dependent on over the last year. “Take a minute. Then tell me about the day. Start with your grandmother. Did she recognize you?”

I dried my eyes and wadded up the tissue in my palm. “She did. I was really nervous that she wouldn’t. My legs were shaking when I walked in the first time.”

“Understandable. It’s been a long time.”

“She knew me. She knew who I was. But she didn’t seem to know how much time had passed. It was like she just picked a page from our history book, and everything continued from there.”

Dr. Kaplan nodded. “Stage five, most likely. Moderate cognitive decline. I’m glad that she has progressed slowly; we talked about how some cases can move twice as fast as others.”

“I know. It’s selfish of me, but it made me happy that she could recognize me still.”

“It’s not selfish. Selfish people tend to be good only to themselves. I think we can both agree that isn’t the case. What you’re more likely feeling is regret.”

“I suppose.”

“The thing with regret is, you can only regret the past. So for you, that’s healthy. Regret the past. Use it. Make a new future. Visit her often. The more the regret is pushed into the past, the easier it will be.”

“I am. I visited her every day this week.”

“That’s good. And how about the other regret that you need to deal with?”

“Brody?”

“Of course.”

We’d spent the better part of a year talking about the man—who else would she be referring to? “I saw him. It didn’t go very well.”

She nodded and waited for me to continue.

“He hates me. I can’t blame him. He assumed I was back because I needed something.”

“Your history runs deep. You’re going to have to earn back his trust.”

“I’m not so sure he’ll give me that chance.”

“There’s only one way to find out. Perhaps once he sees that you’re genuinely clean this time, that you have a job, and you are planning on staying in Marlene’s life, he’ll come around.”

I took a deep breath and exhaled audibly. “I know. It’s not going to happen overnight. He can’t even believe I’m sober, how can I expect him to believe that I’ve gone to bed and woken up thinking of him every day for the last four years?”

Delilah

“Is everything okay?” Brody pushed spicy Thai chicken and fettuccini around the plate with his fork. Tuesday night, he’d said he wasn’t feeling well and canceled coming by. And the last few days, he’d been quiet. Tonight his mood was something that resembled sullen. “Do you not like the pasta?”

“Yeah. I’m good. Sorry, babe. The pasta is delicious. Just tired.”

The rest of the evening was pretty much the same. I felt like I was dragging questions out of him. Normally, I was good with quiet. I’d never been a person who felt the need to talk all the time to be comfortable. The thing was, the quiet wasn’t comfortable tonight.

Later, I tried different subjects. Nothing seemed to interest him enough to talk. Brody was also having an after-dinner drink, something that was similarly out of character for him. He poured a stiff rum and Coke and sat down on the couch, staring into his glass as he swirled the liquid.

“What did you ever end up buying when you went shopping the other day?”

He sipped his drink and looked at me with a creased brow. “Hmm?”

“The family friend you were shopping for last weekend. You were in a gadget store when I called you, and you said you were shopping for a friend’s birthday. Remember?”

Brody looked around the room before taking a sizeable gulp. Placing his drink on the table, he lifted a knee and turned to face me. “I got her a wooden checkers board. She lives in a nursing home and has a thing for game shows. She watches them on TV all day and likes to play board games.”

“Oh. That’s nice of you. Is she a friend of your dad?”

He looked me straight in the eyes this time. “She’s Willow’s grandmother, Marlene.”

There was more to this story. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the rest.

“After Willow disappeared, Marlene started to get confused a lot. She had no one but a drug addict for a daughter and a drug addict for a granddaughter. The woman spent her whole life seeing the good in people, and yet when her time came, when she needed that good to show for her, the two of them were nowhere to be found.” Brody had one arm slung over the back of the couch, I reached up and took his hand and squeezed.

“My dad and I took turns looking in on her for a while after I got back from college. But then my dad eventually retired to Arizona, and I’d be traveling four days some weeks with the team. It just wasn’t safe for Marlene to be alone anymore. So I moved her out of her place and into a private nursing home about three years ago.”

“Wow. And you still keep in touch with her?”

“Haven’t missed a Tuesday since the day I moved her in. Promised her she’d see my smiling face every week.” Brody guffawed. “There’s been some pretty shitty losses on Monday that didn’t have my face smiling on Tuesday, but I haven’t skipped a visit anyway.”

“That’s amazing, Brody. Not many people would do that for someone else. Especially not someone who isn’t even their own family.”

“She’s always been like family to me. I was young when my mother died. Marlene tried to help me and my dad out whenever she could. Plus, someone had to be there for her. Willow sure as shit wasn’t.”

I’d been curious to ask about her since the night he told me about what happened in college, but the opportunity had never presented itself. Until now. “What happened to Willow? You mentioned she disappeared after the night with Colin.”

“She was gone for a long time after that. Didn’t resurface until my first year playing in the pros. That was probably her longest sober period since we were teens. Things were good for a while. Until they weren’t.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It wasn’t. She disappeared again one night. I searched for days. Went to all the usual hangouts I’d pull her ass out of when she was using. Missed half my practices, and when I did show up, it was a fucking waste of everyone’s time. I had no focus. Halfway through the regular season, police knocked on Marlene’s door one night. There were a few homeless camps down near the East River—mostly it’s drug addicts who have checked out of life in general. A police boat was patrolling one morning, found her floating face-down.”

“Oh my God.”

“She’d been without oxygen for almost three minutes and was blue from the water temperature. Marlene and I spent two days at the hospital. She crashed twice, and they brought her back. They didn’t know if she would have brain damage if she woke up.”

“That’s awful.”

“If it were you or me, we would have died or been on a feeding tube drooling for the rest of our lives. But not Willow. Ten days later, she walked out of the hospital like nothing had happened.”

“Wow.”

“I thought maybe the whole thing had scared her sober. And for a while, I think it did. Until December third, four years ago.”

“What happened then?”

“Nothing. It was the last time I ever saw her.” Brody paused, lifted his glass from the table, and swallowed back the remainder of his drink. “Until this Tuesday.”

***

Sleep was nearly impossible that night. There were so many things going through my mind. Things that I made a mental mountain out of because of my own insecurities. Like, for example, the fact that Brody kissed me good night and left it at that. I knew it wasn’t normal for couples to have sex every time they spent the night together. Eventually, there would be nights when we would just need some sleep. We’d settle into a routine and some of the newness would wear off. It was normal. It happened in every relationship. But the fact that it happened on
that night
had me thinking the worst.