The trial and the basketball tournament started the same week. March madness, sadness, what’s the difference? Maddest, saddest March in memory. Every morning she drives in to the city, sits listening, in the wood-paneled courtroom, to the horrors visited upon Carl in his last seconds of life. A week ekes by, interminable, during which she testifies two whole hateful afternoons, hating Dean Goodnight and hating his boss Paxton even harder and hating this Billy Grimes boy with a quiet, boiling passion.
Then cleaning out Opal’s garage one night Aura finds Carl’s old basketball. Forgotten, deflated, its hide scuffed smooth from years of overuse. Holding it in her hands, Aura senses the whole belligerent history of her brother stirring under her fingertips. Every summer afternoon spent sweating on that blacktop court outside church, every frigid winter night spent dribbling inside the Langston University gym. The endless repetitive drilling. Their shared fears and hopes and private confidences. All those silly squabbles. All those teachable moments Carl got so good at forgetting.
It was all still there, even now, flashing hypnotically by her mind’s eye like a parlor trick.
She inflates the basketball and takes it with her to see Nate. It’s Thursday night and she finds him inside the church doing minor repair work, dressed in jeans and a Fat Albert T-shirt and hammering something inside the choir box.
“Hey-hey-hey,” Aura says.
Nate does his best Bill Cosby imitation.
“It’s Aaaauuuura Jefferson!”
“Want to play?”
“Abso-tootin-lutely.”
“Go easy on me now.”
“Please. We’re both too old for false modesty.”
The preacher lays his hammer in the pews and points up to the planks where the stained glass window once was.
“We’re getting a new window soon. Maybe a couple of weeks and we’ll have the unveiling.”
“You’ve been fundraising.”
“Not at all.” A devilish splendor in the preacher’s eye. “But the donor wishes to remain anonymous.”
Outside, the basketball court is illuminated by a single streetlamp. The evening blows brief cold blasts of wind in their faces as Aura and the pastor are warming up.
“How’s Opal?”
“She’s been better,” Aura says, shooting and missing. “But she’s settling in alright.”
The ball bounces off the backboard and a metallic crack rifles across the deserted parking lot. Pastor Nate snags the rebound.
“This ball has seen better days.”
“It was Carl’s.”
“Ah.”
“I’m still so . . . damned mad at him, Nate.”
Letting the basketball fall to his feet, the preacher strides over to blanket Aura in a hug.
“I want to show you something.” Releasing Aura, though she wishes he wouldn’t, Nate works down to his hands and knees, first scrabbling below the basketball net, then scribbling with a twig in the dirt there. “This, Aura Jefferson, is you.”
“Thank heavens I’m not a square.”
Nate laughs.
“I’ve always thought you were well rounded. So if this circle represents Aura Jefferson, answer me this. Where is Aura Jefferson’s past?”
“I didn’t come here tonight for Sunday school.”
“It is exactly why you came here. It’s why you all come. So. Is it out there?” He pokes the dirt outside the perimeter of the circle. Aura draws breath to answer but before she can speak the preacher touches the earth inside of the circle. “Or in here?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Freedom is the difference. I’m always telling people they should take control of their past, you see, because . . .”
“You mean future.”
“The future’s as good a place as any to get started. But if you control your future,” drawing an X inside the circle, “then it must sit here inside of the circle. And if that’s true,” scratching a second X in the circle, “then so does the past. And if the past is inside of you, Aura, that means you control it. You can change your understanding of it, your feelings about it, your relationship with it. Anytime you decide to. Anger, hate, resentment . . . these things are a prison.” Now he’s drawing a box around the circle, scraping a cage of parallel lines in the ground. “People assume that the past and the future are out here beyond their control. But it doesn’t need to be that way. All it takes is the smallest shift in perspective and everything starts to get better.”
“That’s all it takes, Nate?”
“You’re angry with Carl because he fell from grace. Fell hard. You may even believe, on some level, that when he embraced that life of crime your brother deserved whatever punishment God chose to dole out. And maybe that’s true. I don’t believe it’s true but maybe it is. The point, though, is that it no longer matters. Because the worst crimes aren’t the ones committed against us by others. The worst, the most violent crimes, Aura, are those we commit against ourselves.”