Yolanda wiped her face with the side of her hand. "Then what do I do?"
"Show up," said Mama Ruth. "And then show up again. It's very boring. That's how you know it's working."
*
At six o'clock exactly, Emmett was standing at the front door with his coat on.
Yolanda came down the stairs with her keys and saw him there, zipped to the chin, his hat pulled over his braids, his hands at his sides, and she stopped on the third step from the bottom. He had done precisely what she'd told him. Not six-fifteen. Six. He had not been asked to do anything else all day, and so this was the thing he had done.
"You don't have to come," she said. "If you don't want to. You can stay with Mama Ruth, or I can—"
"Mama Ruth's going."
"Then you can stay here. I'll have Mrs. Delgado check on you."
He looked at her for the first time since breakfast. It was a long, level look, older than twelve. "You said six," he said. "I'm ready."
So he came. He sat on the bleachers at Fulton Heights High between Yolanda and Mama Ruth, on Mama Ruth's plaid stadium cushion, with a composition notebook open on his knees and a pencil, and he didn't look up when the teams came out of the tunnel. Up in the top corner of the far bleachers sat a heavy-set man in a Linwood College quarter-zip with a clipboard on his knee.
Dante saw the man too. Dante had seen him before he even got to the layup line.
Here is what nobody in the stands knew, because Dante had told nobody: his left knee had been talking to him since Christmas. Not screaming. Talking. A low, specific ache along the inside, worse in the mornings and on stairs, that he iced in secret in the upstairs bathroom with a bag of frozen peas he replaced every week so nobody would notice the same bag going soft. He knew what it probably was. He'd looked it up. He knew what knees had done to his father.
He also knew, the way you know weather, that if he missed a game in February with a scout in the building, the door his mother kept talking about would close a little. Maybe not all the way. But a little. And he had heard her on the phone with Mama Ruth enough times, late at night, through the vent in his bedroom floor, saying *if Dante gets it* and *when Dante gets it* and *after Dante's settled*, to understand that a lot of things in the house were waiting on the other side of that door.
So he taped the knee himself in the locker room and played.
The first half was good. It was better than good. He hit a pull-up jumper on the first possession and a three from the wing on the second, and he found Kendrick Hollis on a back-cut for an easy two that made the student section scream. He could feel the medal's absence on his chest like a missing tooth; Benny didn't allow jewelry on the floor. He played as if the scout in the corner were the only person in the building, and at halftime Fulton Heights was up nine.
In the third quarter, coming off a screen, he looked up into the stands without meaning to.