She set down the phone.
"I'm good," Jalen said. "I'm going to play in college somewhere. Probably somewhere small. Amari's going to play somewhere big, and I'm not, and that's not because nobody's seen me. They've seen me. I'm a good defender with a sixty-eight percent free throw. Dez knows the number." He made himself keep going. "I love it. I'd play it if nobody ever paid me a dime. But I can't be the way out for everybody. I can't be the reason we have to choose. When you say sports could get me somewhere, I hear *so it better.* And I can't carry that and also play."
Her face had gone very still.
"I'm wearing my old shoes Saturday," he said. "The black ones. I glued the toe. They're fine. The money's back on your card. I'm not telling you what to do with it. I just didn't want it to be the reason."
"Jalen."
"And I want you to come to Buffalo. I do. I'm not saying don't come." His voice broke a little and he let it. "I just want you to know he's going to be in Pittsburgh with nobody from us watching but Grandpa, and he came to every one of mine."
He went to his room before she could answer, because he'd said all of it and there wasn't any more, and because Amari was right. Words were for old people. He was out.
---
Renita sat on the bed a long time.
She thought about the calendar. *JALEN BUFFALO* in red. She thought about the nine-year-old on the stool and the brass top spinning on the kitchen floor, about her father in Sal's shop with his hands clasped behind him, trembling. About Dez at the coffee table, kneeling, the pencil. *Mom, I need your signature tonight.* He'd said *tonight.* He'd known, at eleven, that *later* was where things in this house went to die, and he had tried, as politely as he knew how, to close the door on it before she could walk through.
She hadn't been protecting him from his grandfather. She'd been protecting herself from a basement. And she'd done the exact thing she had never forgiven: she'd let one person's bright future pull the whole house into orbit, and called it a calendar.
At 9:12 p.m., she came out to the living room. Dez was at the coffee table again, in the same spot, writing in the team's engineering notebook. Walter was at the window. Jalen's door was cracked.
"Where's your form?"
Dez went still. Then he pulled the plastic sleeve out of his backpack and set it on the table without a word, as if it might startle and run.
Renita knelt across the coffee table from him. She took a pen from her bag, a cheap blue one from the hospital with STRONG printed on the side, and read the form all the way through, both pages, slowly, the way she should have read it Monday. The medical release. The code of conduct. The chaperone list, where *Walter Hollis (grandparent)* was printed in Ms. Sato's green ink under two other names.
She signed. *Renita A. Hollis.* She printed her name under it. She wrote the date. Then she opened the payment app and sent two hundred and forty dollars to the school activity account, turned the phone so Dez could see the confirmation, and slid both across the table.
"I'm going to Buffalo," she said. "I want to be honest with you. I made a promise to your brother in January, and I'm keeping it. That's not me choosing him over you. But I know it's going to feel like it, because I've been doing exactly that, and I'm sorry. I'm not going to say it's fine. It isn't fine."