Basketball. Lucy Jane Bledsoe

      Open Dore

      ONE

      I'm standing on the free-throw line, sweaty in my uniform, as if the game isn't over. Even the fans are starting to clear out. A few slap my back, move their mouths. They're probably congratulating me on my first Division I game.

      I don't even hear them.

      All I see is his face. My dad's. A man I met for the first time just now when I shook his hand. He has no idea who I am. Last he heard, like about twenty years ago, Mom wasn't able to have children.

      Soon the entire gym will be empty except for me, standing frozen at the free throw line. I finally lope over to the bench and pull on my warm-ups.

      I can handle this, right? Sure. No problem.

      My gym bag rings. I unzip it, reach for my phone, and check the number. Oh boy. I quickly press IGNORE. It's going to be a long time before I can explain this to her.

      My mother's message has always been as plain as buckshot. The moment my father broke her heart is the defining moment of her life. Should I choose to ally myself with him in any way, I may as well just kill her.

      But tell you what. Let's leave Freud out of it. What are the facts here?

      The locker room is empty by now. I strip off my uniform and get under a hot shower. Calm down. Just the facts, right?

      I'm a basketball player. Division I recruit for the University of Oregon. Six feet two inches tall.

      My mom is shortish, you might say dumpy, and a painter. An abstract painter.

      Who do you suppose contributed the most genes to me?

      Yep, him. And guess what? He happens to also be the father of my two new best friends, Becky and Sarah McCormack, the hotshot twins from Indiana, basketball's mecca.

      Like I said, I don't think Freud is going to be helpful here. But the genetics of the situation are sort of interesting. What's coincidence and what's DNA? Our heights are genetic, obviously. But maybe even the highly unlikely fact that we all ended up playing for the University of Oregon has some plausible genetic explanation. After all, Coach Washington recruited all three of us. She's attracted to a particular style of basketball, right? What's funny is that my father spent the last ten years grooming Becky and Sarah for that recruiting moment. Whereas I played in New York—hardly basketball mecca—and for a private school to boot. My mom is supportive of everything I do, and she loves the scholarship, but you couldn't really say her dreams for me ever included athletic competition. So my father's extensive training with the twins might have been superfluous. We all have his ball-playing genes, including a tendency toward a cooperative style and singular focus. All you had to do was feed us and put a roof over our heads.

      Mom will like that part. We got what there was to get from Michael. His staying in our lives wouldn't have contributed anything more.

      I am, however, on the brink of bringing him into our lives. My life. Mom's life. Michael's life. And maybe most alarmingly, Becky and Sarah's lives. I have to figure out how—or if—to do that.

      TWO

      Back to the facts. Here's what I know.

      Back before she had me, my mom owned a café in Wallop, New Mexico. She was young to have her own business, just thirty-three years old. She did most of the cooking herself, and was famous for her meatloaf, fried chicken, and pies. She'd grown up in Adler Hollow, Arkansas, a town she hated with passion and usually referred to as A-Hole, Arkansas. She didn't like to talk about those early years. Who cares, she'd say, about anyone's painful little mortifications? According to Mom, the human imagination is our only triumph, and we should exercise it to our fullest ability. The rest is reporting, and reporting is always false. Start with the fallibility of facts, she likes to say, and you've started to tell the truth. In any case, I do know that she got pregnant when she was sixteen and had one of those botched abortions, which totally fucked up her uterus. They said she wouldn't be able to have children.

      By the time Michael drove his truck through Wallop for the first time, she'd already had shows in a few galleries, one in New York. She was frying chickens and baking blackberry pies, grateful for the hard glare of the sage-scented New Mexican sun, to have escaped Arkansas, to be painting and making something of herself. She once threw a chair across the café when a reviewer wrote that he saw the Missouri River running through every one of her paintings. He meant it as praise, but she thought she'd escaped.

      Mom had a lovely house with a big garden. I always feel bad when she describes her eggplants and spinach and tomatoes and raspberry vines, and even worse when she goes on about the flowers she raised, right in the among the vegetables, because now she's stuck in Brooklyn with just two window boxes. Because of me. I'm why she had to leave. New York, she once admitted, is the best place to hide. How do you think that made me feel?

      Michael had the fried chicken that came with greens and sweet potatoes, a slice of lemon meringue pie, and four cups of coffee. Mom had given up on men by then. She had her painting, her garden, her café.

      As Michael and Mom chatted, he watched the other waitress, Mom's employee, a girl named Merilee. Mom says she wrote Michael off that evening because of the way he watched Merilee's ass. She did notice, though, how easily she and Michael talked. He was a reader, and they liked a lot of the same books.

      He slept in