He looked up. He had her eyes, everyone said so, large and steady, and she had never once known what to do when they were turned on her. "The trip is two hundred and forty dollars," he said. "The shoes were more than that. That's all. It's just math."
"Sports could get your brother somewhere," Renita said, and her voice had gone hard, a door closing on a cold night. "You understand that? This summer is the summer. Coach Macklin says colleges watch the junior circuit. It isn't about the shoes. It's about where they go."
"I know," Dez said.
"So don't put me in a math problem."
Walter Hollis came in from the kitchen drying his hands on a dish towel with a faded lighthouse printed on it. He was seventy-four, with a white goatee he kept trimmed with a pair of barber's scissors and a ruler, wire glasses, and a light blue shirt buttoned at the cuffs even at home. He had worked thirty-one years at Kodak Park, most of them in the machine shop in Building 23, and he still moved through a room the way he'd moved through the shop, looking at everything once and properly.
He didn't say anything to his daughter. He bent over the coffee table and picked up the form, held it at arm's length, and then pushed his glasses up and pulled it close.
He read the whole thing. Dez watched him read it. Jalen watched him read it too, the sneaker still in one hand, the tissue paper crackling.
"This is the National Robotics Qualifier," Walter said. He sounded impressed and a little startled, like a man who'd found a twenty in an old coat. "Northeast region. Pittsburgh." He looked at Dez over the paper. "He qualified? You made it out of the city tournament?"
"We were second seed," Dez said. "Ms. Sato says we're the youngest team going."
Walter nodded slowly. Then he turned to Renita, and his face changed, and it was a face both of his grandsons had seen maybe twice in their lives.
"Then why isn't this signed?"
On the couch, Jalen was still holding the shoe. He looked down at it. His jaw worked as if there was something in his mouth he couldn't swallow, and his ears went hot, and for a second he looked less like a sixteen-year-old point guard and more like a boy who'd been caught with something he hadn't stolen but was holding anyway.
---
Nobody spoke right away. Up on the twenty-second floor the heating came on with a sigh.
"Daddy," Renita said, "this isn't your business."
"He handed it to you. You walked past him."
"I had my hands full."