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Wes took off, striding down the sidewalk in those stupid flip-flops, head and shoulders above most of the other college kids.
He put the car in gear and crept along, keeping behind his brother.
They’d gotten to see their mom in the hospital for a few minutes before she died. He was twelve when he promised his mom he’d look after his two-year-old brother. Not a day of his life had passed since that he hadn’t worried about Wes. Which was why a big portion of his anger today was aimed squarely at himself. He’d let his brother down, and it was up to him to get him back on track.
He pulled up next to Wes. “You’re acting like a child. Get in the car.”
“You’re treating me like a child. Screw off.”
They reached a corner, and Wes crossed, while Deacon had to wait for a bunch of students to slouch past the bumper of his car, cell phones pressed to their ears, oblivious to the traffic, oblivious to the beauty of the campus or the beauty of being kids who fit in there. No wonder Wes took all this for granted. Every last one of them did. When Deacon finally had an opening, he eased the Porsche through and caught up to Wes. He hit the horn, but his brother didn’t turn his head.
“You’re suspended, remember?” he yelled, and three girls turned to stare. “You can’t stay on campus. Where the hell are you even going?”
When Wes stopped walking abruptly, one of the girls ran into him. He grabbed her arm and helped her catch her balance. She swept her hair back off her shoulders, looking up at Wes and falling for his smile without a second thought. One of the other girls stepped closer. Moth to the flame. Deacon shook his head, watching as his brother’s inexhaustible charm claimed another victim. The girls said something, and Wes shrugged. They walked off, Wes eyeing them, focusing anywhere but on him waiting in the car. Wes could follow the girls, walk right on out of Deacon’s life if he wanted to. He’d turned eighteen and the legal guardianship was over. Wes was under no obligation to do what Deacon said anymore, so he did the only thing he could. He held on. Waited.
Finally, Wes opened the passenger door and slumped into the seat, his long legs, in beat-up jeans, stretching under the dashboard.
“Can you not talk to me?” Wes asked.
Yeah. He could do that.
He edged back into the campus traffic. The sooner he got them out of here, the sooner he could start making plans for how he could pull this rescue off.
They stuck to the not-talking plan while they stopped at the dorm and packed up Wes’s stuff. Wes spoke once to ask if they could wait for his roommate, Oliver, whose hearing for his part in the cheating had followed the Fallons’, but Deacon was mad at Oliver, too, and he said no. They didn’t speak again as they loaded the car and left campus, or on their drive back north through New York toward the upstate town of Lamach Lake, where Deacon lived.
In fact, the not talking to each other lasted longer than Deacon had expected. Wes wasn’t normally one for extended silences. Or brooding. If something was wrong with him, everyone in the vicinity knew all the gory details because he whined and moped and generally made a nuisance of himself until someone fixed whatever the problem was or until Wes forgot there’d been a problem in the first place.
The silence lasted so long it unnerved Deacon. He said something he’d never said to Wes: “Do you know what I had to do to give you this life you’re bent on throwing away?”
Wes didn’t look at him. Didn’t move. Deacon should never have said that. He’d raised Wes because he loved him, and he didn’t resent it. When he glanced over, Wes lifted his eyebrows as if daring him to say something else.
“You’re freaking smirking at me? You have no idea how easily your life could have been utter crap. It still could if you’re not careful. You can’t go around not caring and blowing off opportunities forever. Someday you’ll have to settle down and work.”
He could hear himself yelling, hear the things he was saying, and he wanted to stop, but he was just so angry. How could Wes not know he was lucky to be where he was?
Wes’s voice was clipped, controlled and utterly cold when he spoke. “I don’t have to stay with you, you realize. If looking at me is going to piss you off this much, I can leave. I’m eighteen.”
“Too bad you’re suspended from college or you could go back there.”
Wes turned his face toward the window.
“You made a commitment to your team when you took that scholarship. Fallons don’t let their teams down. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
If it did, Wes wasn’t telling.
Deacon couldn’t allow this situation to fester. He needed to put a game plan together quickly, before Wes decided to handle things on his own. He pulled the car off to the side of the highway and, heedless of the traffic spinning past him, got out, then slammed the door. He called Victor Odenthal, his former agent and current business partner.
“Vic, are you busy?”
“Sadly, no. I had a date tonight and she canceled on me. If a woman says she forgot about her salsa class, so she can’t go out with you, are you supposed to volunteer to join the class? Was this a test?”
“Can you meet me at my house? I need to talk to you.”
“Sure. Now? Where are you? Sounds like you’re in a wind tunnel.”
“Standing on the highway. Make it an hour,” Deacon said.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.” He was about to hang up, but then he added, “And yes, she wants you to take dance lessons. Dance lessons are like a free pass to best-boyfriend status. Say yes to them and you could forget her birthday and she’d still forgive you.”
“Okay. Good to know. I’ll sign up while you drive home. See you in an hour.”
* * *
ALMOST BEFORE THE car came to a stop in the driveway of the house, Wes practically climbed out the car window he was in that much of a hurry to get away. Vic drove in right behind them and parked his black Miata into the large turnaround at the right side of the house. Deacon reached into the backseat and grabbed the envelope he’d gotten at the meeting that morning.
He and Vic walked up the flagstone path to the side door of the house, which led directly to the indoor court. When Deacon was a kid, he’d played basketball at any neighborhood hoop he could find. Net, no net. Bent rim. Backboard with bullet holes because some hunter had used it for target practice. Cracked concrete or potholed pavement. None of that had stopped him from playing, because when he was a kid, basketball was the only thing he did that made sense.
Now he had an indoor court laid with perfectly balanced hardwood. The court was well lit and climate-controlled, and had baskets he could raise or lower using the electronic controls concealed behind a panel on the wall near the scoreboard. The same panel controlled the surround-sound system. On this court, basketball didn’t just make sense—it was beautiful.
Deacon grabbed a ball and tossed it to Victor. “Let’s play for fifteen before we talk.” He removed his glasses and set them on the bench under the windows.
Victor dribbled the ball once and said, “You’re on.”
Deacon played harder than he usually did; the tension of the day had him wound so tight he needed the release. Every shot he sank centered him, chipping away some of the load of embarrassed futility that had piled up during the campus meeting. Before too long he and Vic were both sweating, cursing under their breath at missed shots or lost opportunities.
He drove for the basket, sending the ball behind Victor and taking it in. Victor gave up the chase and Deacon went up, one hand pushing the ball over the rim, before he landed lightly on the baseline.
“I had you,” Vic said. Since he was standing with his legs spread, his hands on his knees and his face dripping with sweat as he sucked in one deep breath after another, he was obviously delusional. But since he was also twenty years older than Deacon, and so lacking in natural ability that he’d never even played high school ball despite his deep desire to do so, Deacon cut him some slack.
“You did have me,” he said. And then, because Vic hated condescension as much as he hated cheaters, he added, “In your dreams.”
He walked to the bench and grabbed his water bottle, his glasses and the envelope with the papers about Wes. Vic sat on the ground in front of him and Deacon tossed him a water bottle before opening the envelope.
“Wes got suspended,” he said. “This is the paperwork.”
He looked at the papers as he handed them over one by one. As always when a page of text confronted him, his stomach clenched and the print danced and blurred. He squinted through his glasses and the squiggles on the first sheet settled down enough that he picked out his brother’s name: Weston Bennett Fallon, which reflected his mom’s attempt to mimic the names she heard on her favorite soap opera. He recognized a few other words, but not enough to make sense. Frustrated, he passed the rest of the set to Vic.
He propped his elbows on his knees, head bent, while Victor shuffled through the papers. The court was quiet and he wasn’t sure where Wes was—the one-story modern house was big enough that they could easily avoid each other. The place was far from ostentatious, and at just over three thousand square feet, it wasn’t in contention as the biggest in this Adirondack community. The court was the only true luxury. Deacon didn’t waste money and he didn’t spend it just to spend it. But he’d promised himself that he’d have a court of his own someday and that he did.
He didn’t make many promises. But when he made one, he kept it.
Victor started to read the pages aloud. He’d been reading to Deacon for years, and his voice kept a steady pace. Deacon listened and watched him at the same time. He used to watch kids read in school. With basketball, if he saw a move—a dribble, a fake, a shot—he absorbed the lines of the action unconsciously. Once he’d seen the sequence, his muscles knew how to replicate it. Sure, when he was a kid, he wasn’t perfect at everything he saw on SportsCenter. He had to work on technique and grow into his body. But basketball was never a struggle.
Reading was the opposite. He watched and listened to the other kids, and every time his turn came around, the page looked like a jumble of scratches. Eventually he’d learned enough simple words and patterns to fake his way through. Some of his teachers must have known he couldn’t read, but once he was in fifth grade, none of them did much about it. Of course, that was the year Wes was born, and then his dad had died, so he’d missed a bunch of school. Two years later his mom died and he and Wes got sent to foster care, so maybe the teachers figured he didn’t need to be hassled about his grades. He’d never been sure why no one seemed to realize how little he could read, but he guessed they looked at his parents, his address, his wardrobe and just dismissed him as another dumb kid with no future.
Victor was in the middle of the letter the teacher had written about the assignment Wes had cheated on. Deacon interrupted his friend.
“My draft-day suit was a disaster. You never saw it, but that thing was so no-class.”
“I saw a picture. Green and shiny.” Vic shuddered. “If you’d been my client then, I’d have burned it.”
“Right after I got drafted by the Stars, I got custody of Wes. We moved up here, and that fall, he started third grade at the Dalton Day School. I wore my draft suit to the parent-teacher conference. The teacher never blinked an eye. She treated me straight up, even though I guarantee none of the other parents in Wes’s school looked the way I did. You know what she said? ‘When your brother comes through the door every morning, I can count on his sunny smile.’” Deacon flattened his hands on his knees. “His freaking sunny smile.”
Vic lowered the papers and waited.
“I felt like I was drowning. In high school, I was at the top but in the NBA, I was nothing but a scrawny teenager with acne who played a couple minutes a night off the bench and wouldn’t go out to the clubs with the team. The guys didn’t have any use for me. But then that teacher told me Wes was excelling in school and smiling every day, and I figured I’d pulled off the biggest upset of all time.” He shrugged. “I saved that damn report card. The teacher made an actual smiley face on the bottom. I carried it with me when I went back on the road with the team and looked at it every night.”
“You took care of him, D. Just like you promised your mom.”
“I didn’t see any stupid sunny smile today.”
“Let me finish reading,” Vic said as he stacked the papers back up and squared the corners.
“Can you give me a quick recap and I’ll get a voice file from you later?” Deacon didn’t want Wes to come in and see Victor reading to him. He clasped his hands. “Sorry for making you drive out tonight.”
Vic was the only person who knew he couldn’t read. Deacon hated having to ask him for help. He never would have told him, but Victor figured it out himself when they were in the midst of an intense contract negotiation about six months after they started working together. Victor invited him out for dinner, confronted him and said he didn’t care if Deacon could read English, Martian or neither. They had to be honest with each other, or their partnership had no point.
Deacon thought about the meeting that morning and the additional details Victor had just given him. He couldn’t make sense of the books most second-graders could read with ease, but his memory was exceptional. Without that, he’d never have been able to fake his way along so effectively.
“The community service is the key. If he does that and shows up at the next hearing at school with some letters of recommendation, he can be reinstated, right?”
Victor nodded.
“So I just need to find community service for him to do.”
“Or you could let him find it.”
“Right.”
“Seriously, man. You’ve been cleaning up after Wes your whole life. How many times did he get suspended from high school? Six? Eight? And that vandalism thing when he was a sophomore?”
“That was a prank. They’d sprayed Silly String on some statue, and the town had come down on them because they were from the private school.”
“Be that as it may, Deacon, he’s eighteen. He’s old enough to take responsibility for himself.”
“What if he won’t?” Deacon stood. “My parents never did. What if he’s got whatever they had inside them—and this is the beginning of the end for him?”
“All the more reason you need to step back and let him stand on his own.”
“You know what he’ll do? He’ll find someone in town to give him a cushy job and he’ll live here in our cushy place. How will that change him?”
“What are you going to do? Put him into some hard-labor camp?”
“I don’t know.”
Victor said, “Any chance he could work for a literacy group?”
Deacon’s ears went hot with shame. Victor knew he hated to talk about this. “He’s not a teacher.”
“You’re twenty-eight years old, D. You’ve got years ahead of you to find a girlfriend, maybe have a kid or two, be an uncle to Wes’s kids and godfather to mine if I can ever find a woman with taste impeccable enough to marry me.” Vic held the eye contact. “Maybe you can do all that and keep up the lies about your reading, but it’ll be hard. A part of you will always be off-limits. Is that what you want?”
“Wes doesn’t have to know.” And if Vic didn’t shut up about it pretty quick, Deacon was going to hit him.
“I’m not trying to be a jerk, D, but you’re making a mistake. When he was younger, just out of foster care, he needed you to be the adult. I respect the hell out of you for what you did, and you know it. But he’s an adult now, or as good as. Might be nice to lean on him for some of this stuff.”
“Are you telling me you don’t want to help me out?”
“Don’t be a jackass. I’m just saying maybe he’d like to know you’ve struggled with stuff.”
Deacon felt sick at the thought of telling Wes. He couldn’t bear to see the look on his brother’s face if he found out he couldn’t read. “He’s so damn smart, Vic. He reads all the time. I know he’s in college, but I’m still the only person he’s got to steer him straight. If I tell him I was passed through school with fewer skills than an eight-year-old, he might stop listening to me altogether. How would he ever respect me again?”
“I respect you.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“You don’t depend on me.”
“Maybe it’s time for Wes to quit depending on you. You’ve been carrying him a long while. He might be glad to know he can do something for you.”
“I don’t think that would be helpful, Vic. But thank you for the suggestion.”
Victor shrugged. “No need to go all Ms. Manners on me, Deacon. I knew you wouldn’t want to hear it, but I had to say it. Honesty, that’s why you pay me the big bucks.”
Deacon nodded. “Well, honesty is annoying.”
“So is stubbornness,” Victor said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
They walked together to the side door.
Deacon said, “Honesty isn’t annoying, Vic. I just can’t tell him about this.”
“You can tell him. You don’t want to.”
“And now we’re back to annoying.”
They shook hands. Deacon locked the door behind Victor, then picked up the ball. He spun it on his index finger, then gave it a bounce and spun it on his middle finger before tossing it in front of him and then in one smooth move scooping it up, passing it behind his back and tossing it into the basket. Two points. No sweat. There wasn’t a thing in the world he couldn’t do. Except order off a menu, pick out a birthday card or read the freaking letter when his brother got suspended from college.
* * *
WHEN THE PHONE rang an hour or so later, he was in his room, trying unsuccessfully to nap. He rolled off the bed to grab it, desperate for a distraction.
“May I speak to Deacon Fallon?”
“This is Deacon.”
