What Happens to Goodbye(29)

I looked at the ball, then back at him. “What—”
“My comrade has a bit of an overenthusiastic throw,” he said as he stepped inside, grabbing it from my feet. As he looked up at me, smiling apologetically, my memory sputtered up a flash of him on a TV screen, holding some papers. That was it: he was from the morning announcements at school. “Which wouldn’t be so bad, except his aim kind of sucks.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. I just . . . I didn’t know what was going on.”
“Won’t happen again,” he assured me. Then he turned, lifting the ball with both hands over his head, and pitching it toward the driveway. “Incoming!”
There was a thunk, followed by a series of bounces, each one sounding more distant. A moment later, someone said, “What kind of a throw was that?”
“Dude, you didn’t even try to catch it.”
“Because it wasn’t anywhere near me,” his friend replied. “Were you aiming for the street?”
The guy glanced at me, then laughed, like I was in on this joke. “Sorry again,” he said, and then he was jogging across the deck, out of sight.
I was standing there, still trying to process all this in my half-awake state, when I felt my phone buzz in my back pocket. So that’s where it was, I thought, remembering how I’d been searching my room for it just before bed the night before. I pulled it out, glancing at the screen. As soon as I saw my mother’s number, I realized that in the chaos of the previous day, I’d never called her back. Whoops.
I took a breath, then hit the TALK button. “Hi, Mom,” I said. “I—”
“Mclean!” Bad sign: she was already shrieking. “I have been worried sick about you! You were supposed to call me back twenty-four hours ago. You promised! Now, I understand that we are currently having some issues—”
“Mom,” I said.
“—but we’re never going to be able to work through them if you don’t respect me enough to—”
“Mom,” I repeated. “I’m sorry.”
These two words, like a brick wall, stopped her. In my mind, I could just see all the other things that had been poised on her tongue, piling up like cars on the freeway. Crash. Crash. Crash.
“Well,” she said finally. “Okay. I mean, I’m still upset. But thank you for saying that.”

I glanced outside, the phone still at my ear, just in time to see the guy who’d chased down the ball take a shot at the goal. It wnt up and wide, banging off a nearby tree before bouncing back to the driveway, where Dave Wade, in jeans and an unzipped blue rain jacket, scooped it up in his arms. He shook his head at something his friend was saying, then took a jump shot. I was watching his face, not the backboard, as it clanged off the rim. He didn’t look surprised.
“I do have to tell you, though,” my mother said now, over the still-tentative silence between us, “I was very hurt you never called me. I don’t think you realize, Mclean, how hard it is to always be reaching out to you, and to continually be rebuffed.”
Dave’s friend went up for a layup, stumbled, and sent the ball into the backyard. “I didn’t mean to not call,” I told my mom, watching as he jogged after it. “But Dad got hurt, and I had leave school to go to the hospital.”
“What?” she gasped. “Oh my God! What happened? Is he all right? Are you all right?”
I sighed, holding the phone away from my ear. “He’s fine,” I told her. “Just needed some stitches.”
“Then why did you have to go to the hospital?”
“He didn’t know where his insurance card was,” I replied. “So ...”
Before I could finish this thought, though, I heard her exhale, a long, hissing noise like a tire losing air, and I pictured whatever truce we might have had deflating right along with it.
“You had to leave school because your father misplaced his card?” I knew better than to answer this, as it was not an actual question. “Honestly! You are not his mother, you’re his daughter. He should be keeping up with your documents, not the other way around.”
“It was fine, okay?” I replied. “Everything’s fine.”
She sniffled, then was quiet for a second before saying, “I was so excited yesterday about having you come down to the beach with us. As soon as I heard the house was ready, all I could think of was you.”
“Mom,” I said.
“But then even that has to be so complicated,” she continued. “I mean, you didn’t even want to hear about it, and that used to be something you loved so much. It makes me incredibly sad that instead of having a normal life—”
“Mom.”
“—your father is dragging you from one place to another, and you’re having to take care of him. Honestly, I can’t for the life of me understand why you don’t . . .”
There was another bang from behind me and I spun around just as the door was knocked open, the basketball again soaring through it. It hit the linoleum and bounced, right at me, and as I grabbed it, the phone between my ear and shoulder, I was suddenly infuriated. My mother was still talking—God, she was always talking—as I stomped to the open door and out onto the deck.
“Sorry!” Dave’s friend yelled when he saw me. “That was my—”
But I wasn’t listening as, instead, I took every bit of the anger and stress of the last few minutes and days put it behind the ball, throwing it overhead at the basket as hard as I could. It went flying, hitting the backboard and banging through the netless hoot full speed before shooting back out and nailing Dave Wade squarely on the forehead. And just like that, he was down.