Lying awake that night, he thought: she isn't afraid of the money. She's afraid of me.
---
Renita didn't sleep either. At 2 a.m. she was at the kitchen island in her robe with the laptop open, looking at her bank account and at a text from Coach Daryl Macklin that had come in at 9:47 p.m.
*Reminder: Queen City Showcase is Sat 3/21 in Buffalo, check in 7:15am at the Dome. College coaches confirmed from 14 programs. Summer circuit deposit $300 due by Fri. This is the one, Ms. Hollis. Juniors get seen or they don't.*
March 21st. She'd known that date for two months. She'd blocked it on the shared calendar in red, *JALEN BUFFALO,* and she'd asked for the Saturday off from work back in January, and had to trade a Sunday for it, and the Sunday was the twenty-second.
She pulled Dez's form out of her bag. She'd gone into his backpack after he fell asleep, which she knew wasn't fair, and taken it to read in private. *Northeast National Robotics Qualifier, David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh, PA. Depart Genesee Community Middle School Friday 3/20, 2:00 p.m. Return Sunday 3/22, approx. 9:00 p.m.* And at the bottom, in the district's legal language: *Per RCSD Policy 5120, all out-of-state overnight travel requires the signature of a parent or legal guardian. Signatures by other relatives or caregivers cannot be accepted.*
She read the line twice. She was the only one who could sign. His father, Terrence, was in Atlanta with his second wife and their new baby and had last sent a support payment in November.
She did the money first, because the money was easy to look at. The shoes, $203.39 with tax. Three hundred for Macklin by Friday. Two forty for Pittsburgh. The electric bill. Her account would survive both, barely, if nothing in the car broke before the twenty-seventh.
So it was the money, and it wasn't.
When Renita was eleven, Dez's age, her father had started bringing her down to the basement on Glide Street. He set her on a stool and showed her how to read a micrometer, how to file a burr off, how to find the center of a round piece of stock with a square and a scribe. She'd loved it. For one winter she'd thought she would be a machinist, or an engineer, or whatever her father was when he drew at the kitchen table. She'd built a little brass top on the lathe with his hands over hers, and it spun on the kitchen floor for almost a minute while her mother clapped.
And then he got busy, and the basement became a place she wasn't invited, and later a place nobody was invited, and then a sound coming up through the floor at midnight, and then a second mortgage, and her mother's swollen ankles at the end of a double, and the specific shame of being twenty-nine and pregnant, with a husband halfway out the door, and driving groceries to her parents' house because her brilliant father had bet everything on himself and lost. She had loved how his mind worked, and she'd watched it turn into a weather system the rest of them had to live inside.
She had watched Dez take apart the toaster at seven, the smoke detector at eight, and at nine, a whole old laptop of Walter's, with every screw sorted into an egg carton and labeled. She watched him now at the coffee table, utterly gone into some problem, deaf to his name, and she felt a pull in her chest that was half love and half dread. Pride, and under it a voice saying *I know where this goes.*
Jalen was different. Basketball had coaches, and schedules, and a ladder you could see from the bottom. A kid who could defend and run a pick-and-roll could get a scholarship to a school with a real name, and a degree, and a door. People told you what to do next. Nobody had to bet the house. That was what she'd meant, when she said *somewhere.* Not the NBA. She wasn't a fool. Somewhere with a floor that wouldn't give way.
And Dez was eleven. Dez had years. There would be other qualifiers, other teams, other sheets of paper. Jalen had this summer, these fourteen programs, this one Saturday in Buffalo. You couldn't get your junior year back. That wasn't favoritism. That was a calendar.
She told herself that at 2 a.m. and it sounded true.
What she didn't let herself look at directly was the other thing. If she signed the form, the person who'd ride the bus to Pittsburgh with her son, because she would be in Buffalo, would almost certainly be her father. And she couldn't find a way to put into words, even alone in her own kitchen, why that made her want to put the pen down.
She closed the laptop. She put the form back in Dez's backpack exactly where she'd found it, in the plastic sleeve, behind his math binder. She sent Macklin the three hundred dollars through the app and typed *Thank you, Coach, he'll be there.*