Siena in the fifties and score nineteen points in a game against Holy Cross that he still talked about. He had a photo of it in his office at the dealership. Brent said you could see the newspaper had yellowed but his father's face had not.
At fourteen a ball had come high off the rack, from the left, and hit him in the eye, and there'd been a flash like a camera, and for a week afterward he'd seen what he called a dark curtain at the top of things, and dozens of little black specks floating everywhere like pepper in water. He'd told his father, and his father had said every athlete gets his bell rung, walk it off, you're not a little kid, and the curtain had mostly gone away. But not all the way. There was a place, up and to the left, where the world just stopped. Not black. Not anything. Just a hole his brain had painted over with whatever was next to it, so most of the time he didn't even know it was there. Until something came through it fast.
"Like a ball off the rim," I said.
"Like a ball off the rim." He laughed, short. "Or a door. I walked into a door at the Colonie Center in front of a girl from Shaker. I told her I was drunk."
"Were you?"
"I was fifteen. I'd had a root beer float." He kicked at the slush. "This fall it got worse. Couple of new specks. Flashes when I go up hard. My mom took me to an eye doctor in Latham, a regular guy, and he looked in there with a light and got real quiet and gave me drops and said I needed to see a retina man at Albany Med right away, that there was an old scar and something new next to it and he didn't like the new thing. And my dad called the guy at home and yelled at him. My dad said the Siena man was coming to the Shaker game and if I went into Albany Med and some doctor wrote down retina on a form, it'd be all over the Capital District in a week, and nobody gives a scholarship to a kid with a bad eye." He stopped. "He said you can't sell a car with a dent in the door."
I didn't know what to say to that. There isn't anything to say to that.
"He's not a monster," Brent said, suddenly, fast, as if I'd argued. "You saw him. I know you saw him, my mom said you were standing by the reindeer. But he's not. He's—he goes to every game. He drove me to camp