When Lucas’s mom hadn’t finished her classes by the time Claremont Middle dismissed its students—something that usually only happened two days a week—one of his mom’s students would stay at the house until Lucas’s mom did come home.
Lucas’s favorite babysitter, even though he refused to ever call her that, was Lucy McQuade. She was more like an older sister. She was a sophomore at St. Luke’s College, and wanted to be a writer. When Lucy was in the house, she’d usually sit at the kitchen table doing her schoolwork and Lucas would go upstairs and do his, especially if he had basketball practice later.
But he didn’t do homework the next afternoon after school. He told Lucy that he was going upstairs to poke around in his dad’s old stuff up there.
“Is it okay with your mom?” Lucy said.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “My mom hardly ever goes up there anymore, because I think it just makes her sad, even though she says she’s never going to get rid of those boxes. But sometimes when I’m up there, I just feel as if I’m hanging with him for a few minutes.”
Lucy looked at Lucas over the screen of her laptop.
“I’m sure those boxes are full of some very nice memories,” she said.
“Sometimes even the nice ones make me sad,” Lucas said.
Even though they called it an attic, it wasn’t spooky or full of cobwebs. There was a small window that faced the backyard and let a fair amount of sun in. And Lucas’s mom, being his mom, had kept everything neat and organized. There was even a desk that had belonged to his dad.
Sometimes Lucas would bring his laptop up and sit at the desk and write, and imagine his dad, the one he only knew through everybody else’s memories, looking over his shoulder.
Boxes lined the walls. A few of them had clothes in them, old basketball jerseys, even his dad’s varsity letter jacket from when he’d played for Claremont High. The box with the letter jacket in it had a picture of his dad wearing it, with his arm around Lucas’s mom. They looked happy in that picture.
They had started dating in high school, and his mom had always said, “We never really stopped.”
There were a lot of boxes filled with textbooks from med school. Lucas wasn’t sure why his mom kept them. But she did, along with some old black-and-white composition books filled with his dad’s handwriting, most of which Lucas could barely read. He wasn’t one to talk, of course. His handwriting wasn’t much to look at either.
There were a couple boxes with his dad’s trophies, going all the way back to when he played seventh-trade travel basketball, all bubble-wrapped for safekeeping. There were some cool photographs of Michael Winston at that age, looking a lot like Lucas.
Lucas picked up one now, and felt himself starting to tear up, the way he did sometimes when he was up here alone with the pictures and trophies and memories.
It wasn’t just the pictures of Lucas’s dad and his mom when they were younger. He always looked happy in the pictures, no matter what age he was. If it was a team picture, Michael Winston’s smile was always the biggest one.
The tears went away. His dad looked too happy. Lucas smiled. He knew from Gramps, and from his mom, that his dad had been some player before he tore up his knee. His mom had put together a scrapbook with old clippings from the Claremont paper about his dad’s career. Lucas had read the story about the night his dad had gotten injured, making a steal at the end of a game against Sheridan that saved that game for Claremont. There was a picture with the story showing two of his dad’s teammates helping him off the court.
Gramps was right behind them.
It brought Lucas back to why he’d come up here today. He just wanted to see if there was anything about Gramps he’d missed when he’d been alone up here with these boxes. He wanted to see if there was something, or anything, that would provide even a little information about him. All the other times Lucas had been in the attic, it was almost as if he were visiting his dad’s childhood. He’d never been up here trying to learn about Gramps. Now he wished there was a box with Gramps’s stuff in it. Only there wasn’t. There was nothing up here to tell Lucas about what Gramps’s life had been like when he was a boy growing up in California.
Maybe Lucas should have started asking him questions about that long before this. Or maybe if he had, the answers would have been the same as they were now, which meant no answers at all. All Lucas knew for sure was that by the time his dad had been born, his grandfather and grandmother were living in Claremont.
“C’mon, Gramps,” Lucas said out loud. “Help a guy out here.”
He decided to open up one more box. It was the one with his dad’s Chip Hilton books in it. These were the books that had been Michael Winston’s favorites when he was Lucas’s age, and that he had loved to read as much as Lucas did now. Lucas knew this because his mom had told him, telling him all the time about how these books in particular were most meaningful to him. By now, Lucas had read most of them too. They were about a star athlete named Chip Hilton, who’d grown up in a town called Valley Falls before he and his buddies went off to college. He played football and basketball and baseball, and the books would go from sport to sport and season to season. When Lucas was little, his mom would read Chip Hilton books called Championship Ball and Hardcourt Upset and A Pass and a Prayer as his bedtime stories. Lucas loved them all.
“These are the books that made you love to read before you could read,” his mom told him one time.
He was holding Hardcourt Upset in his hands when a picture fell out of it.
There were two basketball players in it.
It was obviously an old picture, Lucas could tell that just by looking at the uniforms. He couldn’t believe how small and tight the shorts looked. One player wore number 14. One wore number 24. There were holding the same basketball between them. Both the players had their hair buzzed really, really short.
BISONS was written across the front of their jerseys.
Lucas turned over the photograph. On the back was written a date: 10/15/61. Underneath the date were two names: Joe and Tommy.
They were standing underneath a basket, but there was nothing around them that identified the gym. It could have been any gym anywhere. Lucas couldn’t even tell for sure whether they were high school players or college players.
Both of them were smiling.
But who were they?
Why had his dad kept this picture?
Joe who? Lucas thought.
Tommy who?
He’d come up here looking for answers, and now just had more questions.