It was a crate. An orange Stewart's crate, brand-new, still with the price sticker from the store on Hoosick Street.
"I figured you'd want to take the old one," he said. "And you can't leave a pole with nothing on it. Some kid's going to need it."
I looked up at the old crate. Four years of me had gone through it. The bowed left side. The cracked corner. The two roofing nails. And I found I didn't want to take it down. It belonged to the alley and the wall and the train and the Mahoney boy who'd nailed it up before I ever came. It had never been mine. I'd only been the one who kept getting the ball back.
"Leave it," I said. "Leave both. Put the new one on the other side."
So we did. Brent stood on the back bumper of the U-Haul and I handed him the hammer and the roofing nails, and he nailed the new crate to the street side of the telephone pole, a little crooked, and when he climbed down we stood looking at the two of them up there, back to back, the old one bowed and broken and the new one square and bright.
"The new one's going to be too easy," I said.
"Give it a few years," Brent said. "Kids are hard on stuff."
My mother leaned out the passenger window and said it was time. I picked up my ball, the scabby Spalding, and Brent held out his hands, and I passed it to him, chest-high, soft. He caught it without turning his head.
"Hands," he said, and then grinned, a little crooked, and passed it back. "That's a joke. That's me making a joke about it."
"I know."
"Write to me, Brez. Tell me how the gym is. The new one, the man was so proud of."
"I'll tell you how the rims sound," I said.
I got in the truck. We pulled out of the alley onto Second Avenue and turned south toward the bridge, toward the Thruway and the long road down through the Carolinas, and in the side mirror I could see Brent Callahan standing under the two crates in the last gold light, shooting at the new one. He missed. The ball kicked off the side and he turned and went after it, and I wanted to yell out the window and tell him where it was going. But I didn't need to. He'd already turned the right way. He was already there.