She immediately pulled her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans and tried to call Gramps again.

“Voice mail.”

Then she hit a few more keys on her phone and shook her head and said, “Answering machine.”

“We should drive over there and make sure he’s okay,” Lucas said.

Julia motioned for Lucas to pump the brakes.

“He was fine when he called Jen,” she said. “Maybe he just wants some of that space we talked about. And let’s be honest, if he wanted to talk to us right now he’d be talking to us, because there’s nothing stopping him.”

“Except being stubborn,” Lucas said, then added, “Stubborn as me.”

“We don’t know the whole story,” she said.

“And don’t know if Dad knew.”

“Your dad and I never kept many secrets from each other,” she said. “So if he was keeping one about Gramps, he must have had his reasons.”

“You think Gramps will ever tell us the whole story?” Lucas said.

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” she said. “But he might not.”

“And you know what?” Lucas said. “I’d be okay with that, no lie.”

“All you did was ask a question,” his mom said. “I hardly think that question is going to ruin your whole season, especially not with the kind of team you guys have.”

“I just want things to be the way they were,” Lucas said.

“We all want that sometimes,” she said.

He went upstairs to write. Not what he didn’t know about Gramps, but what he did about Mr. Collins. He didn’t think he’d be able to focus on his writing. But he was. For a little while, he did what Gramps was always telling him to do:

Eliminate the noise.

Lucas had spent some time with Mr. Collins the day before, asking him questions about his past, about how he came to love reading and writing, what made him want to be a teacher, why teaching English had become his passion.

It was almost bedtime when Lucas closed his laptop. Thought he might leave some time to work on his basketball journal, but he’d do that tomorrow. Maybe he’d have a better idea what to put in there when he knew more about what was going on with Coach Gramps.

But what was going on?

Lucas felt as if the more he knew the less he knew.

What he did know was this:

There was a lot going on in his life.

An awful lot.

EIGHTEEN

Lucas tried to explain it all to Maria when it was just the two of them at lunch the next day.

When he finished she said, “You should just drop this now.”

“I would have by now,” Lucas said, “if that picture hadn’t dropped out of the book.”

“But it wouldn’t have if you hadn’t gone up into the attic snooping around,” she said.