He told her about the knee first, because it was easier, and she listened with her hand over her mouth and then took the orthopedist's printout and read every line of it twice, the way she read insurance claims, her lips moving slightly. Then he told her about Linwood. Forty percent, maybe. If.
He watched her do the arithmetic. He had watched her do it his whole life, at grocery stores, at the pharmacy counter, at the kitchen table at midnight with the drawer under the microwave pulled open. He watched it go across her face and land.
"Okay," she said. Her voice was very steady. "Okay. Then we look at other schools. We look at the academic money. Your grades are fine. They're not great, but they're fine, and we can—"
"Mom."
"—and there's the community college transfer route, your father did that, and there's—"
"Mom. Stop doing the math for a second."
She stopped.
Dante had been rehearsing this part in his head since Benny's office. It came out differently than he'd rehearsed it.
"Since Dad," he said. "Since Dad, you've looked at me at every game. Every single one. I could find you in any gym in the state with my eyes closed. And I loved it, I'm not gonna lie, I loved it. But I also—" He swallowed. "It was like I was the only thing in the house holding up the roof. Like if I missed a shot, the bills came back. I'd lie up there at night and hear you on the phone with Mama Ruth through the floor. *When Dante gets it.* Every night. *When Dante gets it.*"
Yolanda's face had gone very still.
"And now," he said, "now, the last two weeks, you look at Emmett. At my game you looked at him. At breakfast you look at him. You took a half day to go watch him drop *my* basketballs. Which—good. He deserves it. He deserved it the whole time. But Mom." His voice broke. "It's like there's only one light in this house and you just keep moving it. Before, he was in the dark. Now I'm scared it's me. I don't want either of us to be in the dark. I want you to get, like, a second lamp."
It was so absurd and so exactly right that Yolanda made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob, and she put her hand flat on the granite to hold herself up.
"A second lamp," she said.
"You know what I mean."
"I know exactly what you mean." She looked at him, at her tall, frightened, bighearted son in his dead father's jersey with the faded signature, and she said, "I put it all on you. I did. That wasn't fair. A seventeen-year-old's knee is not a financial plan. I'm sorry, baby. I'm so sorry."
"I'm not mad," he said. "I'm just tired."