“What happened that night in Memphis?” I asked Teddy. “With the upstanding young woman?”
“Don’t ask.”
Teddy and I looked through his chest of drawers and found a lot of sweats and Ts and jewelry but no check stubs or deposit statements. He had a small desk by a window but the drawers were all empty. The room smelled of cologne and sweat.
We walked downstairs and Teddy opened up his brother’s refrigerator, pulling out a couple of Eskimo Pies. He handed one to me.
I grabbed the wooden stick. I hadn’t eaten in a while.
We walked through the house like a couple of kids in a museum, eating ice cream and talking. He pointed out some family photos hung on the wall and a ten-foot-tall oil painting of Teddy leaning against his Bentley. “That was his Christmas present.”
The house was still and hummed with the quiet AC.
“I don’t think we’re going to make it,” I said. “I’ll stay with you, Teddy. All right?”
“No way.”
“Make me leave.”
He nodded and pulled me into his big meaty arms and rubbed the top of my head.
“Shit, man, cut it out,” I said.
“I love you, Nick,” he said. He hugged me like he always did after a game, whether we won or lost. He always acted like he just wanted to savor this one moment and keep it forever fresh in his head.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Really, man,” he said. “You the only one I trust.”
I found a little room by the kitchen with his washer and dryer, a bulletin board, and a tiny little desk. I rifled through the drawers and saw nothing, but reached high on a ledge and found a large box filled with bank statements and credit card bills.
Teddy helped himself to another Eskimo Pie. I had the same.
“What you think of ALIAS?” he asked as I pulled out a few slips of paper, looked through them, and passed them on to him for a second opinion.
“I don’t know.”
“He’s a good kid,” Teddy said. “Grew up in Calliope and lost his mamma about two years back. Heard she’d been dead for a couple of weeks before anyone called the cops. ALIAS wouldn’t call ’cause he thought the child welfare people would take him away.”
I didn’t say anything. We kept working, looking through the box.
“Guess we all know about that,” he said. “Right?”
“What’s that?”
“Losin’ family.”
I nodded.
“But you got JoJo and Loretta now and I still got Malcolm, that sorry sack of shit. Man, look what he did to me.”
We walked back in the TV room and sat down on the leather couch. The room was dark except for a couple of tall stainless-steel lamps Teddy had turned on by the windows. We were in a large cavern, twelve-foot ceilings, space big enough for a scrimmage. The place felt hollow, like the inside of a whale.
“ALIAS talk to you about ball?” Teddy asked.
“No.”
“Kid wants to be a DB,” Teddy said. “Sometimes I have him pickin’ off passes when me and Malcolm be jackassin’ around the studios. Man got vert, you know. If the kid could read, man, I think he could play.”
“He can’t read?”
“Can’t even spell his name.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Not somethin’ he talks about,” Teddy said. “Don’t mean he ain’t bright, though. You know that. Just never been to no real school.”
Teddy crossed his big fat legs and propped them up on a glass coffee table with the latest issues of
“Good Lord,” he said, scanning a picture of a rapper in a gold bikini. Unfazed he was a few hours away from Cash.
“So we wait?”
“Nothin’ else to do.”
I looked at the television. Something had been taped on its blank screen but I was too far away to read it. I walked close and pulled off a piece of paper Scotch-taped to the fifty-inch Sony.
Someone had typed a note and torn the paper in half.
I read the note and then reread it:
I handed the note to Teddy.
I had to help him get to his feet. His whole body shook and he dropped to one knee. “Where’s the kid?” he asked.
“Home.”
“You sure?”
