I am not proud of reading another person’s notebook. I would like that noted next to the sneakers.
But Juno had already opened it, and I keep a notebook myself, so I knew exactly what was inside one. That made it worse, not better.
Hap Talmadge wrote the way he talked, in short square capitals with the verbs left out. The report on me started on the day of the wreaths. This is some of what it said.
HARBOR ST. HANGS 40 WREATHS, NO LADDER. TOWN FORGETS THE TRUCK EVERY YEAR (ASKED HARDWARE GUY). SHE DOES IT ANYWAY. NO COMPLAINT.
WREATH #19 FALLS. SHE DOESN’T WATCH IT. WATCHES WHERE IT’S GOING. RE-HANGS IT SO IT CAN’T HAPPEN TWICE.
HANDED HER A BALL. SHE PUT IT ON A CHAIR LIKE IT WAS ASLEEP. RESPECTS EQUIPMENT SHE DOESN’T WANT.
COACH DREW HER A PLAY ON A PAPER TOWEL. RAN IT FIRST TIME. FINISHED IN 18 MIN. COACHABLE.
CARRIES A GREEN BOOK. WRITES IN IT WHEN PEOPLE TALK TO HER. KEEPS SCORE OF THINGS NOBODY ELSE COUNTS.
TABLE 9. SAW IT BEFORE THE SPONSOR DID. TWO TABLES AWAY. EYES UP THE WHOLE NIGHT.
SAYS “FLORIST” EVERY TIME. MEANS IT.
There was more. There was a whole paragraph about the way I moved through a room of donors without spilling anything. He’d noted that I fixed his centerpiece placement without making him feel stupid. He had written, at one point, simply: KIND TO ROOKIES.
At the bottom, in different ink, still a little shiny, was one more line.
ASKED HER THE WRONG QUESTION. ELEVEN TIMES.
I closed the notebook. Juno looked at me. I looked at the ceramic owl on the top shelf, who has seen a lot in that shop and says nothing about any of it.
“Well,” said Juno.
“Don’t name anything,” I said.
She was quiet for almost a full second.
“I’m calling the mums by the door Due Diligence,” she said. “But I won’t say it out loud.”
The next morning Virgil asked me how the weather was up there, and I gave him his tally mark. Then I put Hap’s notebook in my apron, got into Persephone and drove out across the causeway.
The practice facility was quiet at eight in the morning. The banquet tables were gone, and the court was bare again, honey-colored and shining. Someone was running a floor machine at the far end. The sound filled the gym like a long held note.
Hap was sitting alone in the third row of the bleachers with a coffee. He was not writing anything. That alone told me something was wrong.
I sat down one row below him and held up the notebook.
“You left this.”
He took it and turned it over in his hands. He looked at it the way I sometimes look at the Ledger, like it knew more about me than I wanted it to.
“You read it,” he said.
“Juno read it. I just happened to be standing behind her for four pages.”
That got a small laugh out of him. Then he set the notebook on his knee.
“I was five-seven in high school,” he said. “Still am. I played point guard, good hands, good eyes.
“Every coach I ever had told me I was too short, and they were mostly right.”
I didn’t say anything. I know when someone is getting to the point the long way.
“When I was twenty-two I drove four hours to a semi-pro tryout,” he said. “I’d been practicing for a year.
“The coach watched me for four minutes. Four. Then he said, ‘Thanks, son, we’re looking for size,’ and called the next guy.”
He turned the coffee cup around in his hands.
“So I became a scout,” he said. “I wanted to be the guy who keeps looking after four minutes.
“That’s the whole job. Somebody else sees the obvious thing and stops. I keep looking.”
“You kept looking at me.”
“I did,” he said. “And I wrote down everything that matters. And then I went back to your shop every day and asked you about tryouts.”
He shook his head. “I saw tall, Maude.
“I kept looking, sure. But I already had the answer in my head. I was the four-minute guy with a nicer notebook.”
The floor machine hummed at the far end of the gym. I watched it go back and forth for a while.
“I called the president last night,” he said. “No camera crew. No open session.
“I told him you’re a florist. He asked if I was sure.” Hap shrugged. “I said I had it in writing.”
He asked to be logged.
I didn’t offer. I had the Ledger in my apron, as always, and he nodded at it.
“How many times did I ask?”
I took it out and flipped back. “About tryouts? Eleven. You also asked how tall I was, once, at the wreaths.”
“Put me in,” he said. “All of it. Under my name.”
“That’s not how the Ledger works. It’s one entry per incident.”
“Then make it one incident,” he said. “I was one incident. I was a month-long incident.”
So I did. I wrote it while he watched, which nobody had ever done before.
Entry 2,998. Tidewater Practice Facility. Hap Talmadge. Category B, eleven counts, consolidated.
Then I stopped at the last column.
“What goes there?” he asked.
“What I should have said.”
“What should you have said?”
I looked at the column for a while. Seven years of sharp little answers, page after page, and for once I didn’t have one.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. I left it blank. It was the first blank in the Ledger’s history.
Here is the part I still can’t entirely explain.
I stood up. I walked down the bleachers to the floor and picked up a ball from the rack by the scorer’s table. Hap watched me without moving. I think he was afraid to.
“One shot,” I said. “Not for the team, and not for the president. For your report. You should finish it properly.”
By then a few people had wandered in. Coach Teague was in the doorway with a coffee and a marker. The two rookies from the hallway were on the baseline in warm-ups, stretching and pretending not to watch. The floor machine had gone quiet.
I stood at the free-throw line. I had stood at one before, in middle school, under protest. I bounced the ball once, the way people do on television. It came back up at an angle I had not planned.
I took a breath. I shot.
I would like to describe what happened as an airball. It was not that good.
The ball went up in a long, hopeful arc. It cleared the backboard completely. It struck the shot clock above it with a flat metallic bong, came down behind the basket and rolled under the bleachers.
Nobody said anything for a full second.
Then one of the rookies sat down on the floor. The other made a sound like a teakettle. Coach Teague put her coffee down very carefully, so she wouldn’t spill it laughing.
And Hap Talmadge, scout, thirty-nine years in the business, wrote something in his notebook in large capitals. He tore out the page and held it up so I could read it from the free-throw line.
CANNOT SHOOT. AT ALL. DO NOT SIGN.
I laughed so hard I had to put my hands on my knees. It was the first time I had laughed in that building. It felt like taking off a coat that had been too heavy all along.
When I could breathe again, Coach Teague was standing beside me. She had one of Hap’s pages in her hand, and she was drawing on the back of it.
“Hap says you keep a book,” she said, not looking up. “Every height joke for seven years. Every comeback.”
“He says a lot of things.”
“He’s usually right,” she said. “It’s annoying.”
She finished drawing and looked at me. “My center hasn’t talked to a reporter since July. Billie Pardo. Every interview, every game, every guy in section 112 with a cardboard sign, it’s the same five jokes.”
She held up the page. On the back she had drawn a box labeled BOOK, and an arrow. The arrow ran from the box to a circle.
The circle said 112.
“The season opens in nine days,” said Coach Teague. “I need to borrow your book.”
Up next: The Forecast
Continue to Part 5 →