meant short and dead, the click of a nail meant God only knew but probably left. I could hear it and be moving before the ball came off. And because the crate punished every shot that wasn't perfect, I had also, without meaning to, learned to make shots that were perfect, soft and high and dead center, the only kind of shot a sawed-off milk crate would let through. But I didn't think of myself as a shooter. I thought of myself as the kid who got the ball back.
Nobody had ever seen me do it except Petey and Dolores and the man who drove the Freihofer's truck that came through the alley at six in the morning, who used to honk twice when I made one.
* * *
The night after Brent shoved me into the bleachers, my mother came home from the Hollister plant at eleven-forty with a sheet of paper folded in thirds in her coat pocket, and she didn't take her coat off.
I should explain that the Hollister Collar Company did not make collars anymore, and had not since the Depression, when men stopped buying detachable ones. The old brick building behind the alley was mostly storage. The real plant was a newer cinderblock place out on Oakwood Avenue, where Hollister made men's dress shirts for Sears and for J.C. Penney, and where my mother had worked on the second shift for nine years, running a machine that set collars onto shirt bodies. She said she could do it in her sleep and that some nights she did. Troy had been the Collar City since before the Civil War. On the city seal there's a lady holding something that might be a sword or might be a pair of shears, depending who you ask. My mother said it was shears.
She sat down at the kitchen table across from me. I had been doing chemistry homework, or looking at it.
"They're moving the line," she said.
I knew what that meant. Everybody in Troy knew what that meant in 1986. Cluett Peabody had been shrinking for years. Shirt plants all over the Northeast were packing up and following cheaper labor south, to the Carolinas and Georgia and Alabama, and some of them, people said, would keep going right out of the country.
"Where?"
"Lumberton, North Carolina." She unfolded the paper and smoothed it on the table, the way she smoothed shirt bodies under the needle. "The whole collar line. They're closing Oakwood in June. They're offering transfers to some of us. Supervisors and setters. I'm a setter."
"So you're laid off."