“You say that like you have to say it,” Granma says.

“If I were staying with Dad in London, I’d probably talk about Austin. It’s like, everywhere I go there’s somebody missing.”

She puts her hands on my cheeks and kisses me on the forehead. “There’s a joke people make about marriage. They say the first twenty years are the hardest. Well, you could say the same about childhood. What they mean is, it gets better.”

“Great. That’s very reassuring.”

When she gets up to leave, I ask, “Is Mom going out with Mr. Tomski?”

“Not that I know of,” she says. “But you really should talk to her.”

After she closes the door, I just lie there, watching the ceiling fan turn slowly in the dark. Every time a car goes past I wonder if it’s going to park, then wait to hear if the front door opens. But I guess I fall asleep before Mom gets in.

Twenty

AS THE WEATHER GETS WARMER, Sam comes out to join me more often. He puts on high-top sneakers and jumps around in his green gardening shorts to get loose. “Old knees,” he says.

The branch over the basketball court has started to sprout new leaves and twigs—it keeps getting in the way.

“How come you don’t cut it down?” I ask Sam. “You’re the groundskeeper; you’ve got all the stuff. Ladders, saws.”

“It’s a living thing. Plus, it’s nice to have a little shade. You just have to shoot higher.”

“I’m not strong enough.”

“Yes, you are. I used to play basketball on the deck of a nine-thousand-ton cruiser in the South Pacific. I’m talking about twenty-foot seas—big gusts of wind. Don’t let a tree branch block your shot.”

For a few minutes, I don’t say anything—we just shoot and pass and track down the ball. Then I say, “Is that why you have that anchor tattoo?” For some reason, it seems like a personal question, even though he never seems to hide it.

“Twenty-five years in the navy.”

“My grandfather was in the merchant marine.”

“Where did he serve?”

Sam misses, and I follow the ball into the grass. “I don’t really know,” I tell him as I pass it back.

“Why don’t you ask him?” He holds the ball in his hands for a second.

“He’s dead,” I say. “I never met him.”

“That’s a good reason,” Sam says, and turns to shoot again. Later he says, “Twenty-five years was enough for me. I missed green things.”

He talks about Austin, too. This is where he went to college, but he barely recognizes it now. “You got all this tech money, people moving in from Brooklyn and places like that, California, people with no connection to Austin—they don’t even know what Austin is, or used to be. I mean, look at this neighborhood,” he says. “It used to be, people like me could afford to live here. But not anymore. My son lives in one of these housing developments off two ninety—it takes him an hour to drive in. Look at this school. The building they tore down was a beautiful building; it had some kind of history. But this looks like a supermarket.” He waves vaguely across the football field toward the school. “The only thing left is this basketball court.”