“We play to win, not to get recruited.” I mumble it.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. There will be plenty of chances for scouts. None of them would have even been here if it weren’t for Hannah and Mariah. I’m basketball, Pop.”
Pop crosses his arms and I’m about to hear how excellence is excellence no matter the endeavor when Momma steps in. “Could you two table this?” She nods toward the monster flat screen mounted above the fireplace.
“Yeah,” I say, pointing at that same screen, “these people are all about excellence.”
Most of what I hear about the Boots comes from Walter, who tells of Nancy’s mood swings and rantings about Sheila’s motherly failings, and Sheila’s creative name-calling.
Walter and I have been meeting at Revel 77 about once a week. He seems kind of worn down, but he always shows and either Leah or I always pay, and it’s always interesting.
“You good for another cup?”
Leah and I are both reading, and I gaze up out of the fog. “You’re still following me.”
“Guilty.”
I squint. “You reporting to anyone?”
“Like your mother? Lord no,” he says. “If she knew we were getting together, she’d accuse me of hitting on you.”
I wish that were a surprise.
Leah says, “Tell her you’re hitting on me. I have a thing for older bikers.”
Walter laughs. “There’s a difference between older bikers and old bikers,” he says. “Before you act on that thing, you’d do well to learn that difference.”
I’m between practice and dinner, reading Grayson, the crazy cold water swimmer lady’s follow-up to Swimming to Antarctica. Walter glances at the cover. “Good book?”
“Leah’s recommendation.”
She smiles and waves without looking up from her book.
He nods toward me. “Have you seen Sheila?”
“Not for a while. Now that there’s no Frankie, we don’t cross paths much. She’s gotta know I’m mad enough to skin her alive. Why?”
“I don’t know; for a minute there with all the TV attention, I thought she’d actually try to pull things together, but I only see her at your mom’s place these days, and she’s dropping weight fast. . . .”
I say, “Like a meth user?”
“Exactly like that.”
“She still got teeth?”
“Don’t be mean,” he says.
I watch him across the table. Leather vest over a raggedy T-shirt, Levi’s but no boots—Converse All-Stars—clean, gray shoulder-length hair, a book peeking over the top of his saddle bag on the floor next to his helmet, coffee steaming in the cup. I have to ask again. “Walter, what are you doing mixed up with my family? You’re way better than that. I mean, you’re a good-looking guy. Smart. You’re so kind it scares me. How do you put up with the craziness, my sister’s nastiness?”
He looks over at our reflection in the window. “I am a pretty good-lookin’ fella, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, you are.”
He looks a little longer. “What I am is a pretty good-lookin’ old fella,” he says. Then back at me. “Old enough to know your sister never got enough time to take a breath, step back, and see what was happenin’ to her so she could stop herself from making it happen to the next one down. I know how she got bounced around, how she was treated in some of those places, and how it was no better most times when she came home. That girl’s lucky to be alive, if that passes for luck. Point is, if I was Sheila, I’d be lookin’ around for someone I could vent my rage on, too. Rather see her like that than hopeless; when she gets like that, she could do damage to herself.”
I say, “Maybe, but when she makes her crazy accusations and calls you old and irrelevant, and Nancy every name in the book, it has to get old.”
He smiles. “That’s the good news about old age and hearing.”
Leah closes her binder over her book and rises. “Gotta do it, you guys. Tonight’s family night and I missed the last two.”
Walter watches her go. “I checked that girl out on the sports page. She as quick in the water as everyone says?”
“Quicker,” I say. “Works out ten thousand meters a day, minimum.”
“Whew! Wish I still had that kind of energy.”
“You might if you weren’t wasting so much of it on Nancy.”
“Your mom’s life looks different to me than to you.”
“Walter, I’ve seen Nancy from about every angle there is, and it just can’t be easy. I know she has her days, but she can be meaner than a snake.”
“And how do you think she got so mean?”
“Probably the same way most people get mean,” I say. “From getting treated bad.”
“Bad treatment’s a soul killer,” he says, and squints, breathes deep. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this.”
I nod toward his empty cup. “Buy you another cup of coffee if you do.”
“Deal,” he says slowly, “but you got to swear to secrecy. I mean swear. You knowin’ this would kill your mother. Anybody knowin’ it would kill her.”
I get his refill.
“I’ve known Nancy even longer than you think,” he says. “Long time ago I was in treatment with her.”
“You’re an addict?”
“Naw, drugs never did much for me. Smoked some weed in ’Nam, but pretty much anything else made me feel out of control, and that’s not my thing.”
“So what were you doing in a treatment program?”
“Benefits,” he says. “Government was right there to thank you for your service when you’re hunkered down in war, but that was about all the thank you you’d get unless you had something wrong you could prove. You coulda been sprayed with chemicals that’d take the skin right off you, and cauterize your lungs in the process, but if you couldn’t prove your condition was a result of that damn war, the G-Men just put you on hold. They finally came across with some bennies for the guys they bathed in Agent Orange, but not before a whole lot of them died waiting. Drug addict was the easiest. All you had to do was get a doc to say the word, and if you knew what you
