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Deacon pushed his glasses up on his forehead and rubbed his eyes. He readjusted his glasses. “Oh. That’s good then.” He patted Wes’s arm. “A dog ran into the road. That’s good.”
Why the hell was Deacon patting him?
“No, it’s not—” His mind finally cleared enough for him to realize what was wrong with his brother. “Why are you here, D.?”
“You got hit by a truck.”
“You think I walked in front of it on purpose.”
Deacon’s denial came a second too late. “No. But Victor did say you were upset....”
Wes groaned and not from pain this time. If he could have moved his right arm without passing out, he’d have punched his brother.
“Upset, yes. They’re trading me to Serbia. Fabi is furious. I don’t want to move again.” Deacon was watching him closely. “I wouldn’t kill myself over basketball. Come on.”
At that moment Wes realized his brother had been worried precisely because Deacon could imagine killing himself over basketball. It was a fundamental difference between them.
Deacon had put every single one of his dreams into his basketball career and when it was cut short by an injury, he’d been lost.
That was when he turned his attention to nurturing Wes’s talent for the game. With his brother’s support, Wes got to a great college, played on a powerhouse team and, when the NBA passed him over, found this spot on the Madrid team. He’d expected to keep playing ball for at least a few more years, but... The memory of the accident washed back over him and he felt sick to his stomach. The truck hadn’t caught him head-on, thank God, but that sound when he hit the ground... He suspected he’d be hearing it in nightmares for the rest of his life.
“How long have I been out?”
“Three days,” Deacon said.
“You talked to the doctors?”
Wes gave his brother credit for holding eye contact when he nodded.
He’d never had the passion for the game that Deacon did, but he’d loved playing. Loved being a player, out on the court with the crowd around him. He felt alive when he was the focus of that attention in a way he’d rarely been able to duplicate off the court.
He hadn’t wanted to move to Serbia and certainly hadn’t thrown himself in front of a truck in despair, but that didn’t mean he was ready for the news he was sure was coming next.
Deacon took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes again. “Your shoulder’s done. It was touch-and-go the first time. That doctor from the team, Peter? He said you pulled off a miracle after the surgery, working it back into shape. You’ll be able to use it. But you’re not going to get back to the team.”
Wes let his eyes shut again. You’re not going to get back to the team.
So that was it.
Not going to get back...
He should be wrecked. Run down by a beer truck trying to save a dog, and now unemployed. From living the dream—playing professional basketball, traveling with the team all over Europe, dating gorgeous women—to the end of his career at the age of twenty-eight. For the past twenty years, either he or Deacon had been playing at the top levels of the game. End of an era. The Fallon era.
“You okay?” Wes asked his brother.
“Shouldn’t that be my line?”
“Seriously, Deacon.”
“Seriously, Wes. You’re lying in a hospital bed, your career is over and, judging by the fact that this—”
Deacon pointed out an enormous bunch of pink tulips “—is from the truck driver who hit you, while this—” he pointed to a tiny cactus in a black, plastic pot “—is from Fabi, I’m going out on a limb to guess you no longer have a girlfriend.” Deacon held up his hand. “Not that I’m bummed about that because Fabi is a...well, you know.”
Wes did know. Fabi was living proof you can’t judge a book by its cover. She was gorgeous. Long legs, toned muscles, perfect skin, fantastic smile. Underneath the surface was a sketchy moral code and an endless appetite for Wes’s money.
He’d loved her brains, though, and her wicked sense of humor. But he hadn’t been surprised or heartbroken when she threatened to dump him if he got traded. He’d been more bothered when he realized he wasn’t going to fight for the relationship. What had he been doing with her if he wasn’t willing to fight for her? The not-so-subtle subtext of the cactus seemed to indicate that being hit by a truck was right up there with being traded to Serbia as a deal breaker.
This breakup fell squarely in the category of not missing things you never really had in the first place.
He wasn’t worried about losing Fabi, but Deacon was another question. He couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t trying to get Deacon’s attention or make him happy. Their mom died when Wes was two. He and Deacon had been split up in foster care until he turned eight and Deacon, a full ten years older, got drafted into the NBA and immediately applied for custody of him. After the guardianship ended when he turned eighteen, Deacon had stayed fully involved in his life.
Mostly through basketball.
Now, for the first time, there was nothing tying him to Deacon. His brother had married his girlfriend, Julia, a little more than seven years ago. They had a full plate running the Fallon Foundation Centers and caring for the teenagers they took in as foster kids.
Without basketball, where would his relationship with Deacon land?
For that matter, what would his life look like? It had emptied out in the seconds after he got hit by that truck.
He could do anything. He’d owed a debt to his brother and he’d fulfilled it by playing as long and as well as he could.
“You want to go back to sleep?” Deacon asked.
“In a minute.” He tried to pull the sheet up, but the movement hurt too much. His brother took over, settling it around his shoulders.
“I’m going to get a nurse in here.”
Wes hoped the nurse would give him something to take the edge off the pain so he could sleep. “You sure you didn’t hear anything about a dog? Not in the accident report or anything?”
Deacon shook his head. “Nothing. I wish someone had told me about it. I wouldn’t have been so worried that—” He stood quickly. “Listen, Wes, Julia said I should wait until you’re feeling better, but I’m just going to lay this out there. You don’t have to say yes or no right away.”
Wes really wanted the drugs he was imagining the nurse would bring as soon as Deacon stopped acting out this Lifetime-movie moment.
“Spit it out.”
“I have this job and I want you to take it. I want you to come work for me.”
“A job?”
“Something to keep you busy.”
“I know what a job is. What do you have in mind?”
“You know the Hand-to-Hand pilot program?”
“Yes.”
Deacon and Julia ran the Fallon Foundation, building centers offering sports, arts and tutoring programs in economically depressed towns. The Hand-to-Hand program would make sister center relationships between Fallon centers and those in wealthier locations. The program’s mission statement said, Everyone needs a hand sometimes and everyone has something to offer.
“We have the site identified—it’s a town called Kirkland, right on Kueka Lake. We need the town to give us the lease on the space we’ve picked out, but it means getting a waiver from them. We’re in the last steps of negotiating a partner grant with Robinson University to fund a high-tech tutoring service to three other Fallon centers in New York State. I could really use someone on the ground full-time in Kirkland who can build goodwill and spread the word so we can close both those deals.”
Wes’s head had started throbbing. Hard work didn’t scare him, but he wasn’t sure what Deacon was asking him to do, let alone if he’d be capable of doing it.
“Don’t you want someone with experience?”
“Weren’t you the social chairman of your fraternity?”
“Yes, but you’re not asking me to hire a deejay. You want—”
“Shut up and listen. Didn’t the Madrid team make you do the press conferences after the games because your sound bites were more entertaining than half the games?”
He needed his brother to shut up so he could get some drugs. “What’s your point?”
“My point is, this job is about making people like and want to help the Fallon Foundation. You know our business and people like you.”
Wes stared at his brother.
“I don’t understand it, either,” Deacon said. “But they do.”
“Don’t you need a marketing guy? I majored in electrical engineering.”
“And I would trust you to rewire my toaster.” His brother nodded. “I would. I would also trust you to show Kirkland exactly what the Fallon Foundation Center is and why they need us in their town. If we get the Hand-to-Hand partnerships going, our ability to bring changes to other communities is going to double. Help me bring that home, Wes.”
Since he ultimately owed his life to his brother, when the rare opportunity for him to help came along, he never said no. He had very little understanding of what Deacon wanted him to do, but that was beside the point.
He nodded, which sent the throbbing inside his head off the charts.
Deacon’s jaw tightened. He leaned forward as if he was going to pat Wes again or maybe hug him, but he said simply, “I’ll get the nurse.”
A few minutes later, with what felt like a very effective painkiller finally pumping through his IV, Wes started drifting off again. Deacon was on the phone, talking softly.
“He’s going to do it, Julia. I know you wanted me to wait, but I needed to get him settled.” A pause. “He said there was a dog in the street. He was trying to grab it.”
Wes closed his eyes.
Deacon’s voice was almost a whisper. Wes might have missed what he said next, but he didn’t.
“How do I know if it’s the truth? I want it to be. He’s not going to tell me and you know it. We’ll keep an eye on him. What else can we do?”
* * *
I T WAS ANOTHER THREE DAYS before the doctors were satisfied that he was recovered enough to discharge him. Wes didn’t tell Deacon he’d overheard him. He noticed that his brother was never out of the room long, and twice he woke up to find Deacon staring at him.
The constant scrutiny was disconcerting. Did Deacon really think he’d have tried to kill himself over the Serbia trade?
When he was awake, they went over the Hand-to-Hand center in painstaking detail. By the time he was ready to leave the hospital, Wes was pretty sure he knew more about Kirkland, N.Y., than the mayor of the town. (Jay Meacham, age forty-six. Kirkland High, class of 1980, guard on the lunchtime basketball team at the Y, scotch and soda, never married.)
In the span of a week, he’d been hit by a truck, released by his team and educated in the history and traditions of one very small town in New York in preparation for the new job he hadn’t applied for and didn’t really know how to do. Life was dragging him along again. And he felt just as impotent now as he had when he’d heard about the trade to Serbia. The situation was different, because he was helping Deacon, but somehow it felt the same.
He went back to the apartment he’d been sharing with two of his teammates and took three days to pack up his life and say his goodbyes. On the streets, he kept an eye out for the little dog, but it never showed up. On the upside, his roommates swore they hadn’t seen it dead by the side of the road, either. Maybe it had found a new home.
At the next home game, Wes’s last, the arena was packed. Wes gave a farewell speech at halftime and as he ran through the joking acknowledgments he’d written for his teammates, he looked into the stands. Was this it? The final time he’d be at center court, entertaining a crowd?
That night he made the very bad decision to go out for a tour of nightclubs with the team. He ran into Fabi, who made a big deal over his scar and then tried to drag him into a private room to make out. He thanked her for the cactus and declined the invitation.
When he woke up the next morning he quickly discovered his teammates had given him a thoughtful parting gift. His usual thick hair was gone, shorn down to patchy stubble.
He was staring at himself in the bathroom mirror and wondering if he had time to hunt down Gary Krota to make him eat his razor, when his brother called.
“We have a problem,” Deacon said. “This woman in Kirkland, Trish Jones, ran a fundraiser for us last month. All her own idea and effort, but she used our name and logo. I didn’t actually know about it until she’d been promoting the event for a few days and by then it was too late to cut her off. She got the community involved and we had to be careful because we need as much goodwill as we can muster.”
Wes turned away from his reflection and leaned back on the sink.
“What’d she do, organize a bake sale? It’s not warm enough for a car wash there, is it?”
“She wrote a blog post and put up a donation button. The Kirkland paper said she managed to rake in over sixty-five thousand dollars. In ten days.”
Wes whistled. “That’s not true.”
“Honest to God. She told them she wasn’t expecting that kind of number, but apparently some other local blogger with a much bigger audience got wind of the thing and shared the link to Trish’s fundraising site and it snowballed.”
“Seventy thousand dollars?”
“It’s going to buy a lot of basketballs. Except there’s a little problem.”
“It’s all in pennies?”
“Trish hasn’t answered her phone in the past week.”
“You think she skipped town?”
“She owns a business there,” Deacon said. “I want to believe there’s an innocent explanation, but the other blogger, Chloe Chastain, called us with her concerns. Her reputation is on the line, too. When you get to Kirkland tomorrow, Trish Jones is your number one priority. We need to know where that money is and we need it to be in our bank account, safe and accounted for as soon as possible.”
“Got it.” Wes turned back to the mirror. Gary Krota better hope he never had to make a living as a barber.
* * *
P OSY J ONES SPENT one weekend, every other month, in her mother’s house in Kirkland, New York.
Trish cared what the other women on the Kirkland mom-and-community circuit thought about her and while Posy was often frustrated by her mom, she loved her. So she showed up and did her time and her mom had stories to tell her friends to prove that her relationship with her daughter was just as nice and perfect as she wanted it to be.
Timing the visits also capped the amount of crazy she had to deal with. Her mom had a habit of stepping into trouble and expecting Posy to bail her out, and the problems tended to snowball if she was away from Kirkland too long.
She flicked the button on the steering wheel to turn off the radio, silencing the Kirkland morning show—the same deejay team that had woken Posy up every morning in junior high school.
Before she got out of the car, she turned her phone on. Not a single missed call from her mom during the three-hour trip from Rochester. That never happened. She’d only spoken to her mom briefly the day before, too. When was the last time her mom had kept her on the phone longer than two minutes? Last week?
Main Street in downtown Kirkland was picturesque. As a location scout and quality control inspector for a national hotel chain, Posy was a professional at assessing the up- and downsides to communities. Kirkland was almost all upside—small, but thriving downtown full of locally owned businesses, excellent public schools, a pretty setting tucked on the shore of one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.
