"Yeah."
"Every morning."
"Most mornings."
Torin laughed, a short laugh with nothing in it. He threw his pinny onto the pile.
"Cool," he said. "That's cool. That's great." He wiped his face on his sleeve. "You know what's funny? I live two miles from Corrado. I go by it on my bike. I've seen that stupid orange square a thousand times. I never knew it was his." He shook his head. "He doesn't come to Thanksgiving. He doesn't come to Christmas. My mom drives over to his apartment on his birthday and leaves a cake on the step because he won't open the door when my dad's in the car. He hasn't seen me play since I was ten. Not once. Not one game." He looked at Tavo's feet. "And he's been teaching you. Every morning. For three years."
Tavo did not know what to say. He said the only true thing he had.
"I didn't know."
"Yeah," Torin said. "I know you didn't." He stood there a second longer. Then he said, in a different voice, lower, almost formal: "What I said yesterday. About your mom. That was messed up. I'm sorry."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. I don't even know your mom. That was just mean." He picked up his bag. "The shoes really are trash, though," he said, and for a second, a strange second, he almost smiled, and he looked so much like Wyn when he did it that Tavo felt it in his chest. Then he turned and walked down the hill.
The laundromat on Fourth Street was called Suds City, and it had a second floor that you reached by an exterior wooden staircase on the alley side, painted the same gray as the building and soft underfoot with age. Tavo had never been up it. He had only seen Wyn's truck parked in the alley below it, on mornings when he rode past on the way to the park early and the Ranger was not yet out at Sorensen. He went up the stairs at seven that evening with a paper bag from La Güera in one hand, still warm, and knocked on the door at the top before he could think too much about whether he should.
Nothing happened for a while. Then the door opened about four inches, and Wyn looked out through the gap, in a white undershirt and basketball shorts, his hair flattened on one side from sleeping.
"How do you know where I live," he said. It was not quite a question.