Rick goes back into the game. Receiving a pass from Gramolini, he tries for a jump shot and comes down on his ankle as the ball falls through the net. Rick staggers against Seeds. Gramolini pivots and catches both of them as they lose their footing, Seeds by the elbow, Rick by the armpit. Keeping his grip on Rick, Todd lowers him carefully into a sitting position on the floor. Coach and the officials gather around and examine the injured ankle. In a moment the decision is taken and Rick’s benched, with the AC taping ice onto his elevated ankle. Billy Rank comes in for him and half a minute later the buzzer sounds. In the brief break between the third and last quarter, Sam is reassured by Rick that it’s just a minor sprain.
Sam begins the fourth quarter with a three-pointer. Todd follows with a rebound deuce. Rank strips Seeds and passes it to Skouros, who pops it in. It is in this last quarter that Billy Rank really becomes part of the Big Machine. All at once he is working with them effortlessly, nervelessly. The pleasure of having Billy come into his own makes the game for Sam. During the fourth quarter Greenspark builds a fourteen-point lead while holding Castle Rock scoreless. Sam delivers the last dish to Billy, who gets the last shot, taking the Rock by twenty points.
The mood in which Sam and Deanie make the drive home from Greenspark is wanton. Deanie’s tongue is in Sam’s ear, mouth, on his throat and nipples, her hands inside his shirt, between his legs, squeezing fifteen miles of hard. He begs her to stop before they reach the house. It is impossible to disguise their excitement as they come into the house. Throughout the meal, sitting next to each other, they hold hands under the table. The hidden hands occasionally release each other to wander to someplace squeezable or strokable. They cannot look at each other except in hasty peeks.
At last, Reuben crumples his napkin and unbuckles Indy from her high chair. “I’m taking baby cleanup tonight. Sam, would you and Deanie clear the meal and do the dishes?”
Sam stretches his neck and tries not to look at Deanie as her fingers dig into his thigh under the table. “Sure,” he mutters.
“Thanks,” Pearl says.
She looks so done in, Sam jumps up to give her a hug before she can leave the kitchen.
In a few moments he and Deanie are alone in the kitchen. They work swiftly, keeping their eyes and hands busy with the chores. While Deanie wipes the table, Sam fills the woodbox, and then they are finished. Deanie dries her hands slowly as Sam comes up behind her and takes the towel from her. She takes a deep breath and peeks up at him. Hand in hand, they begin a dignified passage up the back stairs. Midway up, their steps hasten suddenly.
Pearl is suddenly and completely awake, wondering if she ever really was asleep. It isn’t the baby. Indy snoozes deep in baby dreams. The house is as quiet as it should be at—checking the clock-radio—half-past twelve: old house creaks and groans and whispers, a sudden whirring from the furnace. Reuben is awake, she realizes, as awake as she is.
He shifts his pillows, pulls her closer.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks.
“Just waiting for it to be half-past Deanie again,” he says. “Damn kids have been at it all night.”
Her body vibrates with laughter against his. It makes him very aware of the sweet smooth weight of tit, the hipbone under his hand. Her hair tickles his chin. Inhaling the familiar perfumes of her shampoo and her own natural scent beneath it, he turns as if on a spindle, like a sunflower to the sun.
With one thing and another, he doesn’t happen to hear half-past Deanie going off.
Tony Lord is on sick leave from his job and looking for a permanent disability pension now that he’s legally blind in one eye. Fired by the convenience store after her last binge, Judy is not working either. The Greenspark cops are called twice to Depot Street by neighbors. She comes to the door, once in a dirty tieless bathrobe gaping over nothing underneath and once in jeans and a shin darkened with blood from her nose. Each time, her face looks like a heavyweight boxer’s after a savage title fight. And she insists, drunkenly, the neighbors are all assholes, there is no problem—she fell against a doorknob.
The emancipation hearing is a formality. Judy fails to show but has signed the papers—Freddy Cape doesn’t tell Deanie that Judy gave up her signature for a fifth of Jack Daniel’s while Tony was sleeping off the previous night’s load.
The judge casts an uneasy eye over the wretched child. He can’t find any serious fault in the arrangements cobbled together to assure her shelter, education and guidance by this mechanic and his second wife—own their own businesses and a little property, cash-poor but nobody goes hungry. And no, he doesn’t like there being a youth unrelated to this girl in the same household but she’s so bizarre-looking, it might even counteract the predictable rush of adolescent hormones. Of course he knows the boy, has seen him play many times and been impressed with his athletic talents but
