The retina man at Albany Med was named Dr. Okonkwo, and he told Brent, with Mrs. Callahan holding Brent's hand and Gil Callahan standing in the doorway of the exam room like a man waiting for a bus that wasn't coming, that the new tear had started to pull loose at one edge, and that if Brent had played one more game, or taken one more ball off the rack, he would very likely have lost most of the sight in that eye. They sealed it with a laser that night. Brent said it was like having somebody take flash pictures of the inside of your skull for twenty minutes. The old scar, the one from fourteen, they couldn't fix. The hole up and to the left was his for good.
"But the rest stays," Brent told me on the phone, on Christmas Eve. I'd never talked to him on the phone before; my mother handed me the receiver with her eyebrows all the way up. "He said I can play again in six weeks if it heals. With goggles. Real ones, polycarbonate, like the racquetball guys wear. He said if he ever hears I'm playing without them he'll come to the gym himself and drag me off the floor. He's like five-foot-four. I believe him."
"Like Kareem," I said.
"Like Kareem," Brent said. "Except Kareem's seven-foot-two and has a sky hook."
"You could learn a sky hook."
"I can't see the top left corner of the world, Brez. I'm not learning a sky hook." But I could hear him smiling. Then he was quiet, and in the background I could hear a television, and dishes, and nobody yelling. "My dad hasn't said anything," he said. "Since the hospital. Not one thing. He goes to work and comes home and watches the news. He took the ball rack out of the garage. I don't know where it went."
"Is that good?"
"I don't know," Brent said. "I've never seen him not say anything before."
* * *
Gil Callahan came to the Suds-O-Rama on the second Saturday in January.
I was folding. Dolores did wash-and-fold for eighty cents a pound, and on Saturdays I folded for the college kids from RPI who brought their laundry down the hill in pillowcases. My mother was off and was sitting at the little desk behind the counter doing Dolores's books, because Dolores couldn't add. The bell over the door jingled and a cold wind came in off Second Avenue and so did Mr. Callahan, without the blazer. He wore a brown parka and a Siena knit hat and he looked smaller, the way people you've only seen on television look smaller in real life.