in Pennsylvania every summer for six years. He cried when I scored thirty against Catholic. He's just—the only thing he ever had that was really his was those three years at Siena. Everything else he got by being nice to people so they'd buy a Celebrity. You know what that does to a guy? Smiling for a living?" He looked at me. "No. You don't. You live over a laundromat."
"My mom sets collars," I said. "Nine years. She smiles at a machine."
He was quiet. Then he said, low, "Sorry."
"For what?"
"For the laundromat thing. For the bleachers. For the wall under the basket. For Laundry, that was Kevin, but I didn't stop it." He shoved his hands back in his pockets. "For the thing I said."
"'Cause you think you're tough," I said.
He flinched. Actually flinched, the way he flinched from balls coming out of the floodlights.
"I don't even know why I said it," he said. "I heard it come out. It was like my mouth was a tape deck."
"I know why."
"Yeah." He looked up at the crate. "Yeah, I guess you do."
We stood there. A freight train went by down along the river, slow, the horn going twice at the Hoosick Street crossing, and the windows of the laundromat behind me hummed with the last load in the big dryer. Upstairs the light was on in our kitchen where my mother was home tonight, for once, doing the books for Dolores.
"Go to the retina man," I said.
"Callahan's doesn't—"
"I'm not talking to Callahan's. I'm talking to you. Petey's mom said if it's a new tear and they get it early they can fix it with a laser. A laser, Brent. Like Star Wars. If they don't get it, it can come all the way off, the retina, and then it's not a hole up in the corner, it's half your eye. Maybe all of it." I took a breath. "You get hit again the wrong way, that's it. Then you're not going to Siena anyway. Then you're a guy who sells cars with one eye."
He turned and looked at me, and I thought maybe I'd gone too far, that he'd come at me with both hands the way he had at the tryout. I braced my feet. I even put my elbows in a little, like Leon taught me.