He took the picture with him down to his room. While Lucas waited for his mom to get home he opened his laptop, went to Google, and typed in, “Colleges with nickname or mascot Bisons.”
A bunch of them came up.
There was Bethany College in West Virginia. Bucknell in Pennsylvania. A university called Harding. Howard. North Dakota State. Oklahoma Baptist. Lucas didn’t know if they all had basketball teams, but assumed they did, because just about all colleges did.
Did one of them, the guy on the left, look a little like his dad?
Lucas couldn’t ever remember seeing a picture of Gramps at that age. But because of the date on the back of the picture, if the guy on the left did look like Michael Winston, it could have been Sam Winston in 1961.
But it didn’t mean that it was. Lucas’s mom would show him pictures of her from college, when she had a lot more hair than she did now, and even though he knew it was her, he wasn’t sure if he would have been able to pick her out of a class picture.
10/15/61.
Joe and Tommy.
Number 14 and number 24.
If they were college players, that meant the season was about to start in October, if the calendar for college hoops was the same then as it was now. Gramps would have played his college ball about that time.
But these guys were named Joe and Tommy.
If one of them wasn’t Gramps, why in the world had his dad held on to a picture of them? Maybe Gramps had stuck the picture in there a long time ago, even though Lucas couldn’t imagine why. Maybe these guys had been teammates of his, on a team called the Bisons.
Maybe, Lucas thought, he should just take the picture back up to the attic and put it back in the book and do exactly what his mom had suggested he do. Just move on. Leave this alone. Leave Gramps with his own memories, both good and bad. Maybe he should focus his energy on basketball and his journal and his paper on Mr. Collins, and do something else his mom had suggested he do and respect his grandfather’s wishes.
As confusing as everything had become, he didn’t want one school paper to come between him and Gramps. What was the point of that? He knew how special their relationship had always been. He knew how important that relationship was to him, and to Gramps, too. He didn’t know if Gramps would even want to keep coaching after this season. Lucas could see him slowing down, as enthusiastic as he still was about teaching. So if this was going to be their last season together, Lucas knew that his real energy—and his positive energy—ought to go into making it as special as possible.
Gramps talked constantly about playing the right way. Maybe moving on, and respecting his wishes—maybe leaving the past in the past—was a way for Lucas to do the right thing. Or maybe, just maybe, this was a picture Gramps had lost a long time ago, or one more thing he’d forgotten, and Lucas would be doing him a favor by showing it to him.
He’d have to think about that. In this case, he wasn’t sure what the right play was.
First he went downstairs and started to prepare their dinner salad, something he’d promised her he would do before they both left for school in the morning. He cleaned the lettuce, cut up some radishes and carrots and cucumbers. His mom liked to joke that he was on his way to one of those chef shows on television.
When she got home, he went upstairs, got the picture of Joe and Tommy off his desk, and brought it down for her to look at.
Her first reaction was to giggle, before looking at it closely.
“How did players manage to even run up and down the court in shorts that tight?” she said. “They looked like the basketball version of tighty whities.”
“I kind of thought the same thing,” he said. “But that’s kind of not why I’m showing you the picture.”
“Figured,” she said.
“Why would Dad stick an old picture of two guys named Joe and Tommy in one of his old Chip Hilton books?”
“No idea.”
“Is Gramps coming over for dinner tonight?” Lucas said.
“Probably not,” she said. “He always calls first and he hasn’t called today. You know him. Polite to a fault.”
They were seated at the table. She was waiting for water to boil so she could start cooking the pasta she was going to serve with chicken and broccoli. She picked up the photograph, really studying it now, frowning. Then she got up from the table suddenly and said she’d be right back.
When she came back, she was holding a picture of a young guy who looked like the Bisons’ player on the left. He had longer hair, slicked back, looking black in the black-and-white picture. But he resembled the player on the left.
A lot.
She placed that picture next to Lucas’s on the table.
“Did you find that one in the attic, too?” Lucas said.
“No,” she said. “It was in my room. In a little box of old pictures I keep in my closet that I haven’t looked at in a long time.”
“You know one of those guys?” Lucas said.
“I do,” Julia said. “The one on the left.”
“Who is he?”
“Gramps,” she said.