They pulled into the lot with three minutes left and ran. Yolanda ran in her good flats across the frozen asphalt, and Emmett ran ahead of her, and they came through the gym doors into the heat and the noise just as Dante hit a three from the wing to cut it to two.
Mama Ruth was in the fourth row on the plaid cushion. She saw them and lifted one hand, unhurried, as if she'd been expecting them at exactly this moment, and shifted over.
Fulton Heights lost by one. A tip-in at the buzzer, by a tall kid from Westbrook who looked as surprised as anyone. The season was over. The Westbrook side of the gym came down onto the floor, and the Fulton side went quiet, and Dante stood at half-court with his hands on his head and his braced knee shaking a little.
Then he looked up into the stands. Yolanda saw him do it. She saw him find her, and then she saw his eyes move one seat over, to the boy in the grey hoodie with two medals on, holding the gold one up in the air in his fist, high, as high as he could reach.
Dante laughed. Standing alone at half-court with the season over and the other team celebrating around him, he put his head back and laughed.
*
On Sunday morning the kitchen smelled like coffee and the honey-oat rings that tasted like a sneaker if you let them sit too long. Nobody let them sit. There were three bowls on the island, not two, because Yolanda was eating too, standing up, with her phone in the drawer by the stove where she had started putting it at breakfast. Not as a punishment. Just because a drawer was a place you could close.
On the refrigerator, under the lemon magnet, hung the milk-stained score sheet, which Emmett had brought down himself that morning without comment and put back up. Next to it, on two thumbtacks, hung both medals, the big gold one and the smaller bronze one, their ribbons crossed. Next to that, in Dante's handwriting on an index card: *REC. #2 — IMPLEMENTED. STILL LOST. NOT THE BALL'S FAULT.*
"I'm still a little mad," Emmett said, through cereal.
"You can be," said Yolanda.
"For how long?"
She thought about Mr. Pryor and his first Sundays. She thought about the potatoes sprouting in the shoebox.
"As long as you need," she said. "I'll be here. Same time tomorrow."
"That's boring," said Emmett.
Across the island, Dante, in an old grey T-shirt with no name on the back at all, looked at his mother and then at his brother and smiled into his bowl.
"Yeah," said Yolanda Carter. "That's how you know."