and a smattering of students.
The scorer’s horn sounds. The milk-pale players furiously take their last warm-up shots. Then everyone stands to face the flag that’s thumbtacked on the far wall of the gym, where the fading championship banners hang in various states of age. The teams Robbie and Quinn played on—Football, Sectional Champs, 1988; Hockey, Holiday Tournament Champions, 1987—are at least fresher than the moldering felt pennants of his father and uncles—1955 County League Champions; 1954 Co-Champs. They’re all dead now, those second-gen Irishmen, done in by heavy smoking, joyful drinking, muscular cars and, by their own accounts, too-demanding women. Robbie, standing with his hand on his heart as the anthem plays through the tinny PA system, never fails to be saddened about how long ago all these moments have become.
On that level, at least, he and his brother had been very good. There was, besides that, a fundamental clarity in the structure of the games. He’d had a childhood of plumbed chalk-dust lines and careful measures. In-bounds and out-of-bounds; offsides and onsides; balls and strikes. It was only after the sports ended that things had gotten blurry.
Below the banners are the bleachers, with clusters of students in their hoodies and their jeans. It slowly comes to him that there is, among them, a familial face.
Robbie sees Tina, up there, looking at him from afar. His niece, Quinn’s second daughter, from what was always resented as a forced marriage. She’s in the high rows of bleachers, and he can tell by the tilt of her moon-round face she’s checking him out. He hasn’t seen her in a while; the quick mental math reveals the shock that she must be a senior in high school now. If someone had mentioned her name, he’d have conjured a twelve-year-old.
He neither waves nor nods; the family ties are tangled ropes; certain gestures can be read as aggressive. The ref blows the whistle to start, and Robbie turns his attention to the tip-off, between a couple of six-foot-one centers, boys pale as the moon.
The scorer, an old man who doubles as the high-school janitor, turns to him and holds the stare.
“What?” Robbie says.
“Take a breath mint or something, pal. You smell like a goddamned brewery.”
Tina watches her uncle, tapping at his laptop. She’s the younger daughter of Quinn Boyle. There is a sister she hasn’t seen in three years. The nine-year age gap between them is informed by the chronic troubles of her parents, the marriage that could never possibly succeed. Tina doesn’t begrudge anyone, though; she’s never known much different. It may be oddly constitutional, to be the calm child of raging parents. But when she sees Robbie tonight from her spot high in the bleachers, she thinks maybe his is the branch of family genetics she shares.
She hasn’t much seen her father in her adolescence. Tina last saw Quinn ghost by the window of Buddy’s Diner in the gray rain, down the sidewalk with his hands in pockets and head tucked down, heading for his boat. She hadn’t consciously looked up from her waitressing; it was more registering a presence, like a frigid draft through a shut door. The broad window of the restaurant looked out on the slope of street down toward the harbor. She knew it was her father, without seeing his face, with his back to her. He looked as if he was limping. She could tell, as well, that he’d be heading back out on the water, imminently. Small memories of girlhood, of him helming the boat out of the harbor, of her standing with her mother on the dock, waving. It felt like happy times to a girl so small. This was at the tail end of things. She was too young to wonder about the men who were on the couch when her father was at sea, the men who sat with their feet on the coffee table drinking their beer as she was taken by her mother’s hand and put in bed. The music would play from the living room, loudly, as she fell asleep. Then her father would come home, and things would go silent. The laughter she heard as a child was in her father’s absence, from other men, and sometimes from behind her mother’s bedroom door. In time, Quinn’s absence became permanent, but the men still came and went. She didn’t know other people lived differently. Maybe a lot of them she knew didn’t.
“Hey, Boyle . . .” The voice is tight in Robbie’s ear, the touch upon his person insistent. Before he turns, he tries to place it. The second tap comes harder still on his shoulder, nearly a poke. “Boyle . . .”
He turns and is patently unsurprised. It’s Williams, father of the Hawks’ undersized point guard, Billy, who at five feet, two inches would not often be mistaken for a basketball player.
“Jeff. I’m covering the game here.”
“I’m sure you are,” Williams says. He’s his son’s father, a pugnacious man not far over five six himself.
“I want to talk to you man-to-man,” Williams says.
“It’s not still about the preview, is it, Jeff?’
“Yeah, it’s about the preview.”
The crowd lets off a tepid cheer, and he checks back to see the Hawks have just scored, by whom he does not know.
“Ryan Blake,” the scorer says. But even he is watching the better action here, Robbie and another pissed-off parent, from side-wise view.
“Jeff, there’s nothing to say,” Robbie says, dampening his voice. “I wrote that preview in November, and you’re still worked up about it?”
“You shit on my kid!” Williams shouts. Glancing back at the court, Robbie can see Billy Williams, his basketball shorts nearly brushing his ankles, looking over at them as he brings the ball up to half-court.
Robbie has come to the conclusion that covering high-school sports is a career in which you say less and less until, mute, you die or retire. In the Winter Sports Preview just before Thanksgiving, he had called Williams’s son “short.”
Billy Williams should be a key contributor. A magician with the ball who distributes well from the point, his only liability may be that he’s a bit short to provide solid defense.
Robbie turns to Williams. “I only shit on your son if saying he’s short is shitting on him.”
“Don’t give me that,” Williams says. “You knew what you were doing.”
Indeed, he did. That a parent is now up in his face at the end of a disappointing season, barking about a December sentence, is clear: Robbie was right all along. Billy, a perfectly good kid, has been useless on defense, a liability, and proof positive that some people will simply not get beyond their limitation, height-wise or otherwise.
“You embarrassed my son,” Williams says, more angry.
“Sports are in a public arena, Jeff.”
“He’s just a goddamned kid.”
“If you want to be praised, you have to deal with some criticism.”
Now, Robbie’s prophecy fulfilled, Williams says to him, “You probably cost my kid a scholarship.”
“Oh, please!”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means his weak defense cost him the scholarship,” Robbie says, and behind him another rise from the crowd. The scorer, in his version of intervention, says, “Billy just scored. Williams, you’re missing it.”
Williams turns, perplexed. “How?”
“Drive and a layup,” the scorer says.
Williams, at cross-purposes, points his stubby finger at Robbie. “This isn’t over,” he says.
“It never is,” Robbie says. He’s just waiting for the clock to run down the quarter, and the one after that, and finally to grant him one more small release.
3.
ON THIS MORNING, AS ON ALL MORNINGS, ROBBIE shuffles on achy legs to the bathroom. He feels as if he’s walking on circus stilts: the plastic folding chair at the scorer’s table granted him no favor. But his post-divorce apartment is small enough to