That September, after school started, we had basketball practice every afternoon. Saint Vibiana’s coach was Callie’s dad, and he had his eye on the Archdiocese Cup, a March tournament where sixty-four Catholic junior high teams competed for the championship. A small school like ours, with students not so athletic, not so tall, had never won. But Coach Jenkins believed we had a chance. If we demonstrated courage and persistence and the consistent inside game.
Coach Jenkins, an LAPD cop, was hard on us, hardest of all on Callie. She was fast, naturally fast with long, swift legs, and when she could break free: layup. Two points. Able to score from anywhere on the court, she could take the defender out, send that girl skywards so that all Callie had to do was lean forward and shoot to get the instant foul. Callie was fast and when she cut beneath the basket, I delivered the ball directly to the tips of her raised fingers. No look sometimes. Like Magic.
My parents and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment behind the Ambassador Hotel. My mother had been nineteen when we arrived in America, my father, twenty. I had been two.
My mother was a licensed vocational nurse and my father was a plumber, working when he felt the urge, those urges not always coinciding with when pipes needed fixing. That’s why his business, personal and friendly, remained small and manageable, though at times our phone got disconnected for lack of paying the bill. My parents were not the typical striving immigrants like Callie’s mom, who had come from Korea penniless and now owned two video stores and a taco truck. My parents wanted only sufficient money to hang out in our living room with the other Irish from Ulster, from Ballymagorry, smoking weed, drinking beer, and enjoying the craic.
Saturday night I slept in my parents’ bed, letting the party continue out front, and, by first light on Sunday, I crept to the stove to make tea, stepping with care over the ossified bodies on the floor. By the time Sunday evening Mass rolled along, most of the lot were upright, if pale and de-hydrated, with the occasional detour to puke behind the oleander hedge in the church parking lot.
We left Ballymagorry because my mother loved the beach and my father loved my mother.
My basketball playing amused my father, like almost anything I did. He drove me in the plumbing truck to every practice and game, sitting behind our bench, the bulk of him filling two spaces. His encouragements were nonstop and in an accent incomprehensible to everyone but me.
Waiting for a smoke until halftime nearly killed him.