Absent Friends

And if he doesn't wait, if he leaves on his own, he's on his own.

It may come to that. It may have to. And it might be okay if it did, thinks Jack, except this: his mom. If Jack walks out on Big Mike, he doesn't come back, that would be the deal and he knows it. And his mom, this is what she's always been afraid of, Jack knows that, too. Jack did some weird, wild things when he was a kid, does some now, and he'd probably have done even more, played with fire, stuck his head in a lion's mouth, except for the way his mom always looked at him. Not mad, the way Big Mike gets, red and furious. His mom's eyes, when Jack does something loony and gets in trouble (this is how it was when he came back from New Haven), they're happy and sad at the same time. Like she knows something bad is coming for Jack, and she's glad, so glad, it wasn't this time.

Jack would have gone long ago, if his mom's eyes didn't look like that.

So Jack stays. He goes to the office, he runs his crew and hangs out. And waits.

Is he happy? Yeah, sure. Jack's happy.

PHIL'S STORY

Chapter 3

Secrets No One Knew

October 31, 2001

Game over. Phil's team, 48–40. A fast-moving game today, a passing game, the ball getting four, five, six touches before anyone put up a shot: this on both teams. Under the shower in the echoing locker room, Phil thought about that, rifling through the game in his mind as through a card deck, picking out moments to look at again. He did this also with jury summations, with phone conversations: any situation could teach you something, lessons were everywhere if you looked for them. Most people didn't look. The reason behind that (because there was a reason behind everything)? Phil assumed it was this: most people didn't want to know they had choices. People loved the idea of doing what they had to do—God, his clients said that all the time. That was how they told him why they'd shot their sister's husband, why they'd snatched a woman's purse, why the whole damn crowd was cooking meth, wrapping it and dealing it from the nice frame house in Queens.

Had to.

No choice.

And by the time they came to Phil, the damn thing was, by that time, for a lot of them, it was finally true.

Toweling off, looking through the cards in his mind, Phil compared today's game to last week's, to the other games since September 11 and the games in August, in July, in days before.

Right after the attacks, in those first days, the Y was closed like so many places, and no one played games.

When the Y reopened early the next week, Phil and his teammates reassembled. They began again, as everyone tried to do.

Those first games were wild, lawless. People passed too hard or too far, fired up insane shots. No one set things up, no one was making plays. Then a strange thing: in the third game after, Terry the Ball-Hog (even Terry called himself that) made three great passes, two to Brian, who could really shoot, and the third to little Jane, who was cutting in for a layup. It was the right play, a play by the book, though Jane had no layup anyone had ever seen; and Terry, who never before in memory had given up a ball once he had his hands on it, passed for the third time that morning, and Jane took the shot. And missed it. But the next ball that came to her she sent to Brian, who swung it to Terry, and suddenly the passing game was under way, and they had never given it up.

Oh, they still ran the fast break when the chance came, they still posted up and cleared out for the big centers (on those mornings the big centers showed up), but this new thing, this was a team game. These last few weeks, Phil had seen this: the thrill of setting a teammate up in a smooth and beautiful play trumped the thrill of sinking a basket. Almost, it trumped winning.

No one spoke about it; it was possible, it occurred to Phil as he shaved, that he was the only one who thought about it.

What caused the change?

The same thing that made the players who came early to the first game after the attacks hold off starting for nearly half an hour, in case other people were coming but were late, delayed by the erratic subways or by having to show their ID to the National Guardsmen on the corner.

The same thing that made all fourteen players show up that day, something that almost never happened. (Even Arnie had come, though his brother was still missing, later declared dead with no body found; Phil went to the service.)

The fresh breeze of relief that had swept the gym every time a player pushed through the swinging doors that day had flashed Phil back to his childhood, to his Bronx neighborhood, to after-school detours to the newsstand for comic books and Cokes.