It was the first thing she'd said in an hour. Emmett glanced at her.
"Yeah," he said. "He was right. Everybody laughed at him."
"I laughed at him."
"I know." He tapped the tablet. "I was there."
Priya, who had been listening to all of this with the stillness of a girl who has two older sisters and knows when to be furniture, said brightly, "I have to go wash the cooler data off my hands, it's a figure of speech," and disappeared.
Yolanda got off the stool and came over. She didn't touch him. She looked at the PVC frame, the measuring tape, the eleven basketballs in a row along the wall, labeled in Sharpie on masking tape with Dante's age at the time he'd used each one. *Dante 6. Dante 9. Dante 13. Dante 15 (JV).* She had bought most of them. She had not known they were still in the house.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she said, very quietly. "Not about the finals. About this. About all of this, for a year."
Emmett coiled a cable around his hand.
"I did," he said. "In the car. Like four times. You said 'that's great, baby' and then you called Coach Alvarez about the bus." He didn't say it cruelly. He said it the way you'd read a number off a scale. "And then I figured, it's about Dante's thing anyway. So that's kind of the same."
"It's not the same."
"It's kind of the same," he said. "I'm not doing it for you, Mom. I just want you to know that. I'm not doing it so you'll come."
"I know."
"I'm doing it because the ball really dies," he said, and his voice wobbled for the first time, just barely. "It really does. Nobody believed him. And I can prove it."
*
Benny Alvarez called Dante into his office on Wednesday after practice.
"Sit," he said. "Ice that knee while you do."