Mr. Kerwin gave me paper bags with names and addresses stapled to them and sent me out between the end of practice and dinner, and on weekends. Mostly I delivered heart pills to widows in Lansingburgh and insulin to a retired Marine on Third Avenue who gave me a nickel each time and told me about Okinawa. Occasionally Mr. Kerwin sent me up the hill to Brunswick, where the houses got bigger and the driveways got longer and people tipped a quarter.
The first Saturday in December, a little after four, he handed me a white bag with a name typed on the label, and I read it and stood there in the store holding it.
CALLAHAN, BRENT. PRED FORTE 1% OPHTH SUSP. 1 GTT OS QID. DR. M. HAFNER, LATHAM.
"Problem, Theodore?" said Mr. Kerwin, looking at me over his glasses.
"No, sir."
"Then that's on Brunswick Road. The brick one with the Christmas reindeer on the lawn. Mrs. Callahan called it in. She asked that it go to the side door." He paused. "She was very particular about the side door."
I knew enough from Petey's mother, who was a nurse at Samaritan Hospital, to know that OS meant left eye. I didn't know what Pred Forte was. I biked up the hill in the cold with the bag in my jacket and my breath smoking and thought about Brent on the left side of the floor, grabbing at nothing.
The Callahan house was the kind of house you see in the background of a Christmas commercial. Two stories, brick, with white shutters and three lit wire reindeer on the lawn and a long blacktop driveway with a real glass backboard on a steel pole at the end of it, the kind with a breakaway rim, a better hoop than the one at Lansing Hill. There were floodlights on the garage. And under the floodlights, in the cold, Brent and his father were playing.
No. That's not the word. Playing is wrong.
Mr. Callahan was standing about eight feet from his son with a ball rack beside him, a metal cart like the ones in our gym that held a dozen basketballs, and he was taking the balls off the rack one at a time and throwing them at Brent. Not passing them. Throwing them, two-handed, from the chest, as hard as he could. He was a big man, bigger than Brent, gone a little soft in the middle, and he was wearing the red blazer from the commercials over a sweater, as if he had come straight from the dealership. Brent was supposed to catch each one. Some he caught. Some came at him from the left, high, and he turned his whole head to find them and was too late, and those hit him in the shoulder or the arm or the side of the neck.