The Long Shot

Julia straightened up and reached for the purse she’d set down when she’d first arrived. “My new boosters will be key to our successful year. Do you happen to have your checkbook on you?”

Henry rolled his eyes, but he went inside his house and came back with a check. Her mom wrote one as well. She dug out a pad of pink sticky notes and printed Milton Girls Basketball Supporters on the top. She drew a stick figure shooting a ball on the first one and then printed Henry’s name. On the one she made for her mom, she drew two stick figures going up for a jump ball.

“So now we have two fans.”

“Make two more, for Geoff and Allison. I’m going to the city this weekend, and I’ll get checks from them.”

“Four boosters in one day,” she said. “All I need now is my coach.”

* * *

SHE MEANT TO go directly home, but she stopped at her office for two student files she had to review for a special-education committee meeting the next day. She was about to duck out the rear door into the parking lot, but as she turned toward the back of the building, the lights in the trophy case in the lobby caught her eye.

Milton High School had been built in the early 1950s and it showed its age in many ways. The architecture of the lobby, with its thick marble pillars and heavy stone steps grooved deep by generations of students, was still wonderful. The solid stone reassured her. The building would be there the next day and the next, and if she persevered every day, she’d have another chance to do what she could to help the kids she had under her care.

The display case was stuffed full of awards and trophies from years of Tiger basketball dominance. Taking place of pride in the middle of the center shelf, directly under one of the spotlights, was a photo of Deacon Fallon.

He didn’t look like much of a superstar. At eighteen, he had been tall and awkward off the court. Thin enough that he looked gaunt because his body mass hadn’t yet caught up to his height. He’d kept his hair shaved so short his scalp showed through in places, and the combination of blond stubble and pale skin had made him appear, well, mangy. Knowing what she knew now about how some of her students’ families lived, she suspected his diet hadn’t provided much in the way of fruits and vegetables. He’d also suffered from serious acne and a misguided attempt to grow a mustache.

No, nothing about his appearance in the picture said superstar. But she’d seen him play way back then. She might not know how to coach the game, but she knew magic when she saw it. As hard as she’d argued for him to go to college and as much as she still regretted not being able to convince him, she acknowledged his great gift at basketball. She’d just wanted him to trade it for an education and use it as a platform for lifetime employment rather than a get-rich-quick contract.

She’d done her best to persuade him that the NBA would be around for him after college, that he shouldn’t squander his chance to get an education. The entire school had watched the draft in the gym one spring afternoon, but she’d stayed holed up in her office.

She moved a step closer to the case and pulled out her phone, tilting the screen to catch the light from inside the case. She searched his name on Google and turned up a whole lot of pages about his NBA career. She changed her search terms and located him currently—or at least got a step closer to him. He was the financial backer behind a string of physical-therapy clinics, and he resided somewhere near Lake Placid. Did Ty realize he lived just a few hours from Milton, yet still snubbed the boosters?

Finding his phone number wasn’t hard, and before she really thought the action through, she thumbed open her contacts and stored his number. Not that she was planning to call him. Not that he’d come back to coach, anyway. But what if she did call him? Maybe he wouldn’t come himself, but what if he knew someone, or, as Henry had suggested, maybe he’d pay for a real coach? Weren’t professional athletes always looking for photo opportunities for their charities?

Could that skinny, stubborn, serious kid with the sweet shot and ruthless instinct for opportunities on the court hold the key to saving her girls?

CHAPTER TWO

DEACON SLAMMED HIS hand against the glass door of the university administration building and stalked out. He made no attempt to hold the door for the idiot he called a brother. In fact, the way he felt right now, he hoped the door would hit Wes in the face. The kid desperately needed someone to knock some sense into him.

“Deacon, wait,” Wes called.

He kept walking. His Porsche convertible was parked in a visitor’s spot right outside the building. “Deacon!” His brother was behind him, the flip-flops he wore slapping the pavement.

“Get in the car.”

“Can’t you listen for one minute?”

“I was just at a meeting with your coach and a very nice woman from the dean of students office. A meeting in which I fully expected to listen to what you had to say, but— Wait a minute. You weren’t there, were you? They were talking about kicking you out of school, Wes, and you couldn’t be bothered to show up?”

“I got there.”

“A whole hour late. The meeting was over before you managed to drop by.”

“Aren’t you even going to listen to my side of the story?”

“How can there possibly be ‘your’ side to paying your roommate to do your work? How can there possibly be ‘your’ side to skipping practice? Or getting caught in a bar with a fake ID? And I’d really, really like to know how there can be ‘your’ side to stealing your coach’s car and ‘parking’ it inside the weight room.”

He heard Wes’s barely suppressed snicker when he mentioned the car.

Deacon walked back up the sidewalk to face his brother, muscling into his space because he was angry enough that he didn’t care about being nice. Deacon and Wes Fallon were both over six foot and both had spent a good part of their lives in the gym. But Deacon was ten years older and he’d shouldered responsibility for their family at an age when most boys were dreaming about learning to shave. So while he and Wes might be physically matched, he was still able to back his little brother down a step when he wanted to.

“You wouldn’t be laughing if Coach Mulbrake had called the cops when he found out his car was stolen—”

“It was a joke, not auto theft.”

“How is it not theft if you took his car out of his garage without his permission? The only reason he didn’t file charges is that I begged him not to. I worked too damn hard to get to a place where I don’t have to ask anyone for favors, and I spent the last hour doing exactly that because you think everything is a big freaking joke!”

Wes squared his shoulders and put his hands on his hips. “You’re not even going to listen, are you?”

The kid might be eighteen, but he still sounded six when he thought he was being treated unfairly. Which happened more often than expected in the privileged life of Wes Fallon.

“I don’t know what you could say that would convince me you haven’t screwed up the sweet deal you have here to play ball and get a college degree on top of it. You’re suspended, Wes, and unless we scare up three hundred hours of community service and a fistful of letters of recommendation, you can kiss your college-basketball career goodbye.”

Deacon felt sick thinking about how wrong college had gone for Wes. He’d tried to give his brother everything, and he had a horrible feeling Wes didn’t want any of it because he didn’t know how much an education, respect, a life with value meant. How could his brother throw away his life on irresponsibility?

Wes might have been too young to know what had really happened to their parents, but Deacon had watched his dad drug his life away, day after agonizing day, until the man had died of exposure, drunk and strung out in the snow, just a few months after Wes was born. Their mom had died two short years later, killed in a fire at a club on a night when she’d called in sick to work. Deacon understood what happened to people who didn’t fear consequences.

“No, Wes, I’m not in the mood to listen. Get in the car. Keep your mouth shut, and we’ll talk later.”

“I’m not getting in the car.” Wes’s cheekbones were stained with splotches of red, a sure sign he was angry. That only served to piss Deacon off more. What exactly did Wes have to be angry about?

“I’m not asking you, Wes. I’m telling you. Get in the car, because if I leave without you, I’m not coming back.”

He climbed in the driver’s side and slammed the door. He took his time finding the key and fiddling with his seat belt, the whole time praying that Wes wouldn’t call his bluff. Deacon felt a stab of the panic he thought he’d left behind when he signed his first pro contract—panic that he’d lose his brother because he was too stupid to figure out how to rescue him.

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?”