“Pick up the rest of this mess,” he says, not bothering to look my way, instead pulling his phone from his pocket to answer a call—probably from my mother—the back door slamming to a close behind him.
It takes me nearly an hour to gather the rest of the debris in our driveway, and I pick up the can my father kicked onto the Harper lawn, the bottoms of my sweatpants getting soaked from the frosty dew covering their long grass. It looks like it hasn’t been mowed in weeks, though it will be dead and covered in snow soon, so I suppose there’s no reason.
Our lawn is small—most of our front yard made of small plants, wood bark, and bricked walkway. The rest is just a long driveway—Owen’s basketball court.
The air is growing frostier, and my breath comes out in a thick fog as I drag the heavy bag of trash to our can near the street. I flip the lid over and hoist the bag up, stopping it right on the edge, pausing to look at the large metal ring weighing down everything inside. The paint is worn from most of it, and at least two of the bolts look to be stripped. It’s trash, and it has no business hanging on my house. No one in our family will ever throw a ball through it.
But Owen will. He did. And he will again.
Only, now he won’t.
“Damn it!” I yell, my voice echoing in the emptiness of our quiet neighborhood street. I kick the bottom of the large, black, plastic canister, then I pull the bag from the edge and drop it to the ground. I have to stand on one of the can wheels to reach the hoop inside, and its brackets make it heavy and hard to bring back over the edge, but I manage to. I slide it down the side of the can, leaning it against the can while I throw my trash inside and shut the lid.
Holding my breath, I take a few steps closer to my house, looking to see if my father is still inside, still talking to my mom on the phone, but the lights are all off. It’s quiet, and I’m pretty sure he’s gone to bed. The metal is heavy, but I’m able to loop my arms inside the hoop and carry it to the garage that my father left open. I put his tools away first, knowing he probably won’t need them again for quite some time, if ever. He isn’t really handy; he’s more the type of man who likes to be prepared. Then, I slide the hoop behind the stack of boxes to keep it safe.
I’m saving it. I just saved Owen Harper’s basketball hoop. No…I saved my hoop, at my new home—the hoop Owen Harper uses, at my new home. And I have no idea why he uses it, why he steps foot night after night on my driveway, below my window. I have no clue why he pushes my buttons, or why I let him.
I saved his hoop, and I don’t really know why I did it. But I had to.
Goddamn it. I had to.
Chapter 6
I spend the rest of my weekend practicing until my mom gets home, going into quiet mode when she needs to catch up on sleep. When she wakes on Sunday, we find the box labeled BLANKETS and make a large bowl of popcorn, settling in for a binge on home improvement shows. My mom has these fantasies of home construction…not necessarily building a home from scratch, but taking a sledgehammer to something—something like a wall.
She would be good at it. I could even see her having her own show—Home Surgery with Karen Worth. She did a lot of painting in our row home in the city. She’d change entire rooms on her week off, even if they didn’t need new paint. She always said she was addicted to change, but I kind of think change terrifies her, and making those small changes, the superficial kinds, was her way of being brave.
“We should make a fire,” my mom says. “Your dad said he got some wood during the week. Go check on the side of the house.”
I haven’t been outside once this weekend, not since the clean up. Owen’s truck came home sometime after I fell asleep Saturday morning, and it hasn’t moved from its spot. I would have heard him.
Slipping my feet into my warm boots, I wrap my scarf around my neck twice and push through the front door, letting the screen slam behind me. I follow the small woodchip path along the side of the house, along the driveway, noting Owen’s tires still at rest at the end of their skid marks.
My neck is still craned to the side when I hear the sound. He’s standing right in front of my mom’s car, his ball dropping every few seconds to the pavement, then bouncing back up into his hands. I could run, but he’d hear me, so I keep my eyes down at my feet as I walk past him to the wood stacked in the corner.
“You really had to take the fucking hoop down?” he asks. He bounces the ball two more times while I look at the pile of wood, deciding I can carry two logs at once.
“It didn’t do it,” I say, not lying. My inside voice begging my outside voice to tell him I saved it. I saved your hoop. It’s here. I promise. I don’t know why I care so much.