“Coach, I’m sorry Ma is upset and everything, but—can I still come to practice, like you said earlier?”

I put my hands on her shoulders. “Your mom is mad at me, and maybe for good reason, but that has nothing to do with my relations with you. Of course you can still come to practice. Now let’s get you to bed. Upstairs or down?”

“I’d like to go to my own bed,” she said, “only Ma thinks stairs will kill me. Is that right?”

I made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know, honey, but maybe if we took them superslow you’ll be okay.”

I helped her up the steps one at a time to her attic room. The stairs were in exactly the same place as they had been in my childhood home on Houston, and they were the same steep risers, decanting you through a square opening onto the attic floor. The little dormer room had been fixed up with the same care as my parents had put into my space. Where I had had Ron Santo and Maria Callas over my bed—a strange juxtaposition of my parents’ unconnected passions—April had the same poster of the University of Illinois women’s team that Josie did. I wondered how painful it would be for her to wake up every morning to the active life she no longer could take part in.

“Do you know who Marie Curie was?” I asked abruptly. “You don’t? I’ll bring you her biography. She was a Polish woman who became a really important scientist. A different life than basketball, but her work has lasted over a hundred years now.”

I pulled the bedspread down for her and saw underneath the same red-white-and-blue sheets that Josie and Julia had on their bed. Was this solidarity with Team USA, or what?

“You and Josie buy your sheets together?” I asked as I tucked her bear into the bed.

“Oh, these flag sheets, you mean? We bought them at church. My church was selling them, and so was Josie’s, and a bunch of the others. Most of us girls on the team bought them—it was for something to do with the neighborhood, cleaning it up or something, I don’t know, but even Celine bought a set; it was a team thing, we did it together as a team.”

I looked for a label, but all it said was “Made with pride in the USA.” I made sure she had everything she needed—water, a whistle to summon her mother if she needed her in the night, her CD player. Even her schoolbooks, if she felt like doing homework.

I was halfway down the steep stairs when I remembered Billy’s phone. I’d taken it out of my peacoat when I left it at the cleaners and put it in my bag, wondering what to do with it.