Lucas invited Gramps in for homemade apple pie left over from dinner when they pulled up in front of the house on Cypress Lane. It was the only house Lucas had ever known.
“Doc says I have to cut down on the sweets,” Gramps said. “More old man stuff.”
“You keep talking about how old you are,” Lucas said. “But we were talking after practice the other day, and we all wish we had as much energy as you do.”
“All I can do now is talk a good game,” he said.
His grandfather leaned over from behind the wheel, kissed Lucas on the cheek, and told him he’d see him tomorrow night at practice.
Lucas asked what he was going to do when he got home.
“Watch a game,” he said.
“Which one?”
“Any one,” Gramps said.
The car didn’t pull away until Lucas was inside the front door and waving out at his grandfather. Lucas’s mom was at the kitchen table, grading papers. She taught English at the small college in town, St. Luke’s.
She looked at Lucas over her reading glasses and smiled.
“I was thinking after you left tonight,” Julia Winston said, “that if I added up your official practices with the Wolves and your unofficial practices with your grandfather, basketball is as much of a job for you as seventh grade is.”
“But I don’t think of it as a job, Mom,” Lucas said. “A job is cleaning my room.”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” she said, still smiling at him.
“I should have known I was walking into a trap,” he said. “But I promise I’ll do it at halftime of the game.”
“There’s always a game,” she said.
“It’s the Celtics,” he said.
If LeBron was Lucas’s favorite player, the Celtics were his favorite team, because they had been his dad’s team. Same with his mom. And they shared the same favorite Celtic, Jayson Tatum, the small foward from Duke whom Lucas was sure was going to be one of the best players in the league someday, probably soon.
“I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “Why don’t you run upstairs and clean your room now, and then maybe we’ll have a conversation about you maybe being able to watch till the end of the game tonight.”
“Who’s the best mom in the world?” he said.
“The one who will only consider letting you stay up late if your room passes inspection,” she said. “Which would be the same mom who plans on watching some of the game with you as soon as I finish reading these papers.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t like basketball. She did. She had told Lucas plenty of times about how much she’d loved watching his dad play when he was the star at Claremont High School, at least before he tore up his knee his senior year, doing enough damage to it that he lost out on any chance at a college scholarship. Gramps had talked more about the player Michael Winston had been, the kind of star high school point guard he wanted Lucas to grow up to be.
But instead of playing in college, he’d become a pre-med student. After college he went to med school, and a few years after graduating from med school he became the youngest team doctor in the history of the Boston Celtics, an orthopedic surgeon specializing in the kind of ACL tear that had ended his career.
He was only in his early thirties. If he couldn’t still play basketball himself, he was working for the team that had been his team growing up. Then he had gotten sick. Lucas had read up on the kind of pancreatic cancer that had taken his dad from him before he even knew him. The only blessing, according to Gramps and his mom, was that it had happened fast. According to them, he had been diagnosed at Thanksgiving, and died a couple months after the one and only Christmas he had been able to share with his baby son. Now Lucas was only able to have Christmases with his dad in the pictures, and the videos.
“You can’t live your life fixed on what you never had,” Gramps had said to Lucas more than once. “You start doing that, it will eat away at your heart.”
Then he’d say to Lucas, “The key to real happiness in this world is appreciating what you have, and knowing what you want. Everything else is just noise.”
Lucas wasn’t sure what the noise part meant. But he trusted that his grandfather knew what he was talking about, and not just because he’d lived as long as he had. He trusted him to know what was right, and not just on a basketball court.
Some nights Gramps would come over and watch a game with Lucas on television. Some nights his mom would watch with Lucas, and they’d turn off the sound on the television, and each of them would read a book. Lucas figured he’d probably been born with a love of basketball in him, because of both his dad and Gramps. But he knew he’d gotten his love of reading from his mom.
But she remained a basketball fan herself. A couple times a year, she’d manage to score tickets to a Celtics game, and she and Gramps and Lucas would make the two-hour car ride to Boston, usually on a Friday or Saturday night. It was just one of about a thousand ways Lucas’s mom could find to show him how much she loved him. And she never missed one of his games.
“You’re sure you’re not too tired to watch?” Lucas said after he had cleaned up his room. The game was still in the first quarter.
“Tired of us losing to the Pistons right now,” she said.
“It’s the end of a long road trip,” Lucas said.
“We still can’t be losing to the Pistons,” she said.
He’d finished his homework before he’d left for Westley Park. He’d done a really good job on his room, not even tossing any clothes under the bed, as much of a hurry as he was in. Now he was next to his mom on the couch. As usual, Lucas had his laptop out so he could follow what was happening in other games around the NBA. For now, though, he was focused on the Celtics, who seemed to be making up a ten-point deficit in a blink, mostly because of the defense and ballhandling and passing of Jayson Tatum, who was suddenly on a rip. Tatum had just driven down the lane and then kicked out a no-look pass to Gordon Hayward in the corner. Then Hayward drained a wide-open three-pointer.
“Gramps says that people always talk about the open man in basketball,” Lucas said to his mom. “But he says they should talk about the most open man.”
“He used to say the same thing to your dad,” she said, and sighed so loudly it made both of them laugh. “All the time.”
On the screen, Tatum made another steal, drove the ball down the court with Hayward, the taller guy, on his left. Two-on-one fast break. But this time Tatum gave the defender a head fake, the defender moved over in front of Hayward, and Tatum drove past him, and elevated and dunked the ball.
When the first quarter ended, the score was tied. His mom said there was something to do in the kitchen. She came back about five minutes later with the popcorn she’d just heated in the microwave.
“Who’s the best mom in the world?” Lucas said again.
“I believe that question has already been asked and answered,” she said.
Then she said, “How’s Gramps?”
“I hate it when he talks so much about being old,” Lucas said.
“He is old, honey,” she said.
“I just don’t want him going anywhere,” Lucas said.
“Your grandfather,” she said, “is healthy as a horse. And you know why? Because of all the good he has in him.”
“I just don’t want anything to happen to him,” Lucas said.
His mom reached for the remote and muted the game. “Where’s this coming from?”
“He just seems to talk more and more about being an old man,” Lucas said. “He even used that as an excuse for not coming in for apple pie and ice cream.”
“He’s just watching what he eats so he stays around for a long time,” Julia said. “And you know that joking about his age is kind of his thing.”
She leaned over now and pulled Lucas close to her.
“He is going to be around for a long, long time,” she said. “And would you like to know the reason why?”
“Why?”
“You.”