The Long Shot. Ellen Hartman

you meet me at my house? I need to talk to you.”

       “Sure. Now? Where are you? Sounds like you’re in a wind tunnel.”

       “Standing on the highway. Make it an hour,” Deacon said.

       “What’s going on?”

       “I’ll tell you when I see you.” He was about to hang up, but then he added, “And yes, she wants you to take dance lessons. Dance lessons are like a free pass to best-boyfriend status. Say yes to them and you could forget her birthday and she’d still forgive you.”

       “Okay. Good to know. I’ll sign up while you drive home. See you in an hour.”

      * * *

      ALMOST BEFORE THE car came to a stop in the driveway of the house, Wes practically climbed out the car window he was in that much of a hurry to get away. Vic drove in right behind them and parked his black Miata into the large turnaround at the right side of the house. Deacon reached into the backseat and grabbed the envelope he’d gotten at the meeting that morning.

       He and Vic walked up the flagstone path to the side door of the house, which led directly to the indoor court. When Deacon was a kid, he’d played basketball at any neighborhood hoop he could find. Net, no net. Bent rim. Backboard with bullet holes because some hunter had used it for target practice. Cracked concrete or potholed pavement. None of that had stopped him from playing, because when he was a kid, basketball was the only thing he did that made sense.

       Now he had an indoor court laid with perfectly balanced hardwood. The court was well lit and climate-controlled, and had baskets he could raise or lower using the electronic controls concealed behind a panel on the wall near the scoreboard. The same panel controlled the surround-sound system. On this court, basketball didn’t just make sense—it was beautiful.

       Deacon grabbed a ball and tossed it to Victor. “Let’s play for fifteen before we talk.” He removed his glasses and set them on the bench under the windows.

       Victor dribbled the ball once and said, “You’re on.”

       Deacon played harder than he usually did; the tension of the day had him wound so tight he needed the release. Every shot he sank centered him, chipping away some of the load of embarrassed futility that had piled up during the campus meeting. Before too long he and Vic were both sweating, cursing under their breath at missed shots or lost opportunities.

       He drove for the basket, sending the ball behind Victor and taking it in. Victor gave up the chase and Deacon went up, one hand pushing the ball over the rim, before he landed lightly on the baseline.

       “I had you,” Vic said. Since he was standing with his legs spread, his hands on his knees and his face dripping with sweat as he sucked in one deep breath after another, he was obviously delusional. But since he was also twenty years older than Deacon, and so lacking in natural ability that he’d never even played high school ball despite his deep desire to do so, Deacon cut him some slack.

       “You did have me,” he said. And then, because Vic hated condescension as much as he hated cheaters, he added, “In your dreams.”

       He walked to the bench and grabbed his water bottle, his glasses and the envelope with the papers about Wes. Vic sat on the ground in front of him and Deacon tossed him a water bottle before opening the envelope.

       “Wes got suspended,” he said. “This is the paperwork.”

       He looked at the papers as he handed them over one by one. As always when a page of text confronted him, his stomach clenched and the print danced and blurred. He squinted through his glasses and the squiggles on the first sheet settled down enough that he picked out his brother’s name: Weston Bennett Fallon, which reflected his mom’s attempt to mimic the names she heard on her favorite soap opera. He recognized a few other words, but not enough to make sense. Frustrated, he passed the rest of the set to Vic.

       He propped his elbows on his knees, head bent, while Victor shuffled through the papers. The court was quiet and he wasn’t sure where Wes was—the one-story modern house was big enough that they could easily avoid each other. The place was far from ostentatious, and at just over three thousand square feet, it wasn’t in contention as the biggest in this Adirondack community. The court was the only true luxury. Deacon didn’t waste money and he didn’t spend it just to spend it. But he’d promised himself that he’d have a court of his own someday and that he did.

       He didn’t make many promises. But when he made one, he kept it.

       Victor started to read the pages aloud. He’d been reading to Deacon for years, and his voice kept a steady pace. Deacon listened and watched him at the same time. He used to watch kids read in school. With basketball, if he saw a move—a dribble, a fake, a shot—he absorbed the lines of the action unconsciously. Once he’d seen the sequence, his muscles knew how to replicate it. Sure, when he was a kid, he wasn’t perfect at everything he saw on SportsCenter. He had to work on technique and grow into his body. But basketball was never a struggle.

       Reading was the opposite. He watched and listened to the other kids, and every time his turn came around, the page looked like a jumble of scratches. Eventually he’d learned enough simple words and patterns to fake his way through. Some of his teachers must have known he couldn’t read, but once he was in fifth grade, none of them did much about it. Of course, that was the year Wes was born, and then his dad had died, so he’d missed a bunch of school. Two years later his mom died and he and Wes got sent to foster care, so maybe the teachers figured he didn’t need to be hassled about his grades. He’d never been sure why no one seemed to realize how little he could read, but he guessed they looked at his parents, his address, his wardrobe and just dismissed him as another dumb kid with no future.

       Victor was in the middle of the letter the teacher had written about the assignment Wes had cheated on. Deacon interrupted his friend.

       “My draft-day suit was a disaster. You never saw it, but that thing was so no-class.”

       “I saw a picture. Green and shiny.” Vic shuddered. “If you’d been my client then, I’d have burned it.”

       “Right after I got drafted by the Stars, I got custody of Wes. We moved up here, and that fall, he started third grade at the Dalton Day School. I wore my draft suit to the parent-teacher conference. The teacher never blinked an eye. She treated me straight up, even though I guarantee none of the other parents in Wes’s school looked the way I did. You know what she said? ‘When your brother comes through the door every morning, I can count on his sunny smile.’” Deacon flattened his hands on his knees. “His freaking sunny smile.”

       Vic lowered the papers and waited.

       “I felt like I was drowning. In high school, I was at the top but in the NBA, I was nothing but a scrawny teenager with acne who played a couple minutes a night off the bench and wouldn’t go out to the clubs with the team. The guys didn’t have any use for me. But then that teacher told me Wes was excelling in school and smiling every day, and I figured I’d pulled off the biggest upset of all time.” He shrugged. “I saved that damn report card. The teacher made an actual smiley face on the bottom. I carried it with me when I went back on the road with the team and looked at it every night.”

       “You took care of him, D. Just like you promised your mom.”

       “I didn’t see any stupid sunny smile today.”

       “Let me finish reading,” Vic said as he stacked the papers back up and squared the corners.

       “Can you give me a quick recap and I’ll get a voice file from you later?” Deacon didn’t want Wes to come in and see Victor reading to him. He clasped his hands. “Sorry for making you drive out tonight.”

       Vic was the only person who knew he couldn’t read. Deacon hated having to ask him for help. He never would have told him, but Victor figured it out himself when they were in the midst of an intense contract negotiation about six months after they started working together. Victor invited him out for dinner, confronted him and said he didn’t care if Deacon