We just waited for them to come home. I had no idea how long it took to drive from D.C. to Franklin, so we tried to go about our day, but whatever I came up with—math flash cards, Silly Putty, animal masks—I’d catch the kids staring off into space. Their skin was splotchy, warm to the touch, but the fire never came to the surface, as if they were holding on to it for when they really needed it. Or maybe they had burned themselves out the day before. I should have been keeping notes, doing scientific research, wearing safety goggles. There was so much that I should have been doing, that I could have been doing, but not a fucking thing made sense to me. I just fed them, made them wash their hands, listened to whatever nonsense they wanted to tell me. I took care of them, you know?
We were outside on the basketball court just as dusk began, the light all red and golden and perfect. Bessie was trying to hit five free throws in a row, and when she did that, she made it six, then seven. She had a nice shot, a little janky, but we could work with it. Whenever she tracked down the ball after a miss, she practiced dribbling between her legs, taking these weird strides, keeping her head up like a general surveying the battlefield. With her hair and her determined scowl, she looked like a punk rocker, like apocalypse basketball. Roland was on the other side of the court, throwing up underhanded free throws and hitting a lot of them, like Rick Barry, though the kid seemed to be putting no thought or effort into it, which, of course, also made me happy.
I called them over for a game of H-O-R-S-E, the three of us lined up single file. Before they had time to blink, Roland was out and Bessie was at H-O-R-and I was pristine. I knew kids, just like adults, wanted to win at everything they ever did, but I thought this was good child rearing, to show them how difficult it is to be good at something, to rejoice when you made small improvements. The kids didn’t seem to mind, liked watching me line up the hardest shots and effortlessly knock them down.
“How much longer is summer?” Bessie asked me.
“Still a while to go,” I told her.
“What will you do when it’s over?” she asked.
“I haven’t thought about it,” I replied, and it was true that I really hadn’t. “I haven’t had time to think about it. I’ve been thinking about you guys.”
“Where will you go?” she asked, not letting it go. “Will you stay here?”
“No,” I admitted. “I’ll probably go back home.” I thought about my mom, that room in the attic, and I wanted to cry. But I had money now, though I hadn’t checked my bank account since I got here. I could get my own place. A decent apartment, something with windows, where normal people congregated.
“Will you take care of some other kids?” Roland asked.
“Probably not,” I said. “I’d probably hate them after being with you guys. They’d be so boring.”
“They’d suck,” Bessie offered, helping me along. Roland nodded his approval; how could those kids be anything other than sucky?
“Yeah,” I said. “I might go back to school. That would be the smart thing to do.” I had almost a year and a half of credits from community college and night school, all the fits and starts when I’d told myself that I would pull my life together and then never lasted long enough to save myself. I prayed that they wouldn’t ask me what I’d major in, because that felt like a riddle, all the steps I’d have to take to give them an answer.
“Maybe you’ll meet somebody,” Roland said. “And get married. And have kids.”
“I doubt it,” I told him.
“Maybe,” he said. “You never know, right?”
“I guess not,” I said. I didn’t want to weigh him down with my life; what would be gained? I turned around, facing the opposite hoop, and threw the ball over my head. It went right in, and the kids cheered. It made me smile. I remembered those games when you would just ride this wave, when it felt like all you had to do was keep your feet under you and you couldn’t miss. If you thought about it, tried to figure out why it was happening, it would leave you, and you could feel it when you put up your next shot. It was gone. So you put your head down, ran down the court, stayed on your man, and just waited until it came back to you. And you promised yourself that you wouldn’t lose it again, that you’d hold on to it this time.
We heard the car coming up the driveway, and we stopped shooting, watching it pull into the roundabout, right in front of the house. Bessie dropped the ball, and the two of them started sprinting to the car. I called out to them but then just started jogging after them, wondering what we were running toward, if we should have been going in the opposite direction.