Hot Hand

Table of Contents

 

 

The best part of sports is watching young people try not just to get better, and make their team better, but also to find the best in themselves. From the time I began coaching, I’ve taught the importance of teamwork, and that’s why I rooted so hard for Billy Raynor, the hero of this book. You will, too. Written in the spirit of Mr. Lupica’s
Travel Team
, this is a book for kids who love basketball, and for anybody who loves cheering for a comeback kid.

 
—Larry Brown, Hall of Fame basketball coach

PHILOMEL BOOKS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by The Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2007 by Mike Lupica.

eISBN : 978-0-399-24714-9

First Impression

Acknowledgments

My thanks, as always, to those who so generously read my books as they are being written: my wife, Taylor; Esther Newberg; William Goldman; Susan Burden; and, of course, Michael Green.

 
And, as always, I thank the children whose spirit runs through all these books:

Chrisopher, Alex, Zach and Hannah.

It had been three days since Billy Raynor’s dad told them that he was going to live in a different house.

His mom explained that it was something known as a “trial separation.”

Yeah, Billy thought, a separation of thirteen blocks—he’d counted them up after looking at the map in the phone book—plus the train station, plus the biggest park in town, Waverly Park, where all the ballfields were.

His parents could call it a “trial separation” all they wanted, try to wrap the whole thing up in grown-up language, the way grown-ups did when they had something bad to tell you. But they weren’t fooling Billy.

His dad had left them.

Now his mom was leaving, too.

She wasn’t leaving for good. It was just another one of her business trips, one Billy had known was coming. She’d told him and his sister and his little brother that she had to go back up to Boston for a few days because of this big case she was working on. A
real
trial, instead of a dumb trial separation. That was why it was no big surprise to him that her suitcases were in the front hall again, lined up like fat toy soldiers. And why it was no surprise that the car taking her to the airport, one that looked exactly like the other long, black, take-her-to-the-airport cars, was parked in the driveway with the motor running.

Another getaway car, Billy thought to himself, like in a movie.

From the time his mom had started to get famous as a lawyer, even going on television sometimes, she always seemed to be going somewhere. Now it was because of a case she’d been working on for a while. She said it was an important one.

But as far as Billy could tell, they all were.

So she was going to be up in Boston for a few days. And his dad was now on the other side of town, even though it already felt to Billy like the other side of the whole country. Billy was ten, and both his parents were always telling him how bright he was. But he wasn’t bright enough to figure out what had happened to their family this week.

He wondered sometimes if he was ever going to figure out grown-ups.

His best friend, Lenny, said you had a better chance of figuring out girls.

All he knew for sure, right now, the end of his first official week of living with only one parent in the house, was this: It was about to be no parents in the house. And on this Saturday morning, with his sixteen-year-old sister, Eliza, still at a sleepover and his brother, Ben, already at his piano lesson, pretty soon it would be the quietest house in the world. With their dad gone, at least the arguing between his parents had stopped. Only now Billy couldn’t decide what was worse, the arguing or the quiet.

Of course, Peg would be around. Peg: the nanny who had always seemed to be so much more to Billy.

To him, Peg had always been like a mom who came off the bench and into the game every time suitcases were lined up in the hall again and one of the black cars was back in the driveway. It had been that way with Peg even before his dad had up and moved out.

Billy’s mom had finished up a call on her cell phone while he finished his breakfast. His dad used to make the pancakes on Saturdays. But his mom had done it today, maybe trying to act like things were normal even if they both knew they weren’t.

His mom, whose first name was Lynn, sat down next to him on one of the high chairs they used when they were eating at the counter in the middle of the kitchen.

“Hey, pal,” she said.

“Hey.”

He speared the last piece of pancake and pushed it through the puddle of syrup on his plate.

“I’m sorry to be leaving so soon, after. . . .” She hesitated, like she could sometimes when Billy would hear her upstairs in her bedroom, practicing one of her courtroom speeches at night.

“After Dad left us,” Billy said. “That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”

“You’re right, I was,” his mom said. “So soon after that. But you understand it can’t be helped, right? I know you don’t think your dad and I did a very good job of explaining what’s happened to us all. But I hope I explained why I had to go back up to Boston today.”

Billy the bright boy said, “Mom, I know it’s your job.”

“And,” Lynn Raynor said, “you understand why I’m having you and Ben and Eliza stay here with Peg and not move over to your dad’s place, don’t you?”

His mom had already gone over this about ten times. Now Billy was afraid she was going to do it all over again. Maybe it was something lawyers did, explained things until you practically knew them by heart.

“I understand that part, Mom,” he said. “This is our home. And you don’t want us to get in the habit of going back and forth between you and dad until—”

“Until this whole thing sorts itself out,” his mom said, finishing his thought for him.

Billy nodded, even though that was the part he really didn’t get, since it seemed to him that things had sorted themselves out already.

They were here.

His dad was there.

Case closed, as his mom liked to say.

“Got it,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, getting down off her chair. “How about a hug?”

Billy jumped down and gave her one, harder than he’d planned. What she had always called the Big One.

“You be the man of the house while I’m away,” she said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

It was the same thing his father had said on Wednesday before he drove away.

But Billy Raynor didn’t want to be the man of the house.

He just wanted to be a kid.

At least it was basketball season.

Billy wasn’t the best player on his ten- and eleven-year-old team in the Rec League at the YMCA. Lenny DiNardo was the best player on the Magic, by a lot, even if Billy would never admit that to him. Lenny was one year and one month older than Billy, and seemed to do almost everything better than Billy.

For now, Billy’s favorite part about basketball was shooting. His dad was always getting on him to pass more, telling him that there was no law against him passing the ball once in a while, that basketball wasn’t one against five, that the last time he’d checked, it was still five against five. But Billy thought of himself as a shooter, one of the best shooters in their league. It wasn’t like their team had been losing, so even though he would pass up an open shot sometimes and pass to somebody else, he really didn’t think there was anything wrong with the way he played.

His mom would sometimes joke—at least before his dad moved out—that the first thing Billy had inherited from his father was stubbornness.

His dad coached their team. When somebody would ask Joe Raynor what his son’s position was, he’d put his hands together like he was getting ready to shoot and say, “
This
position, pretty much.”

If Billy was anywhere nearby he’d say, “Funny one there, Dad.”

Most of the time, of course, there weren’t a lot of laughs around the Magic. His dad was a tough coach, even with Billy.
Especially
with me, Billy thought. “Hard core” was the way his dad would describe his approach to basketball, even Rec League basketball at the Y. He said that was the way he’d been taught to play basketball, and that was the way he was going to teach it.

One time Lenny’s dad, a pretty funny guy who didn’t seem to take basketball or anything else too seriously, said that it was tough love around Joe Raynor’s basketball team, but without much love.

Billy knew his dad loved basketball, and loved him, even though you couldn’t tell either one if you were in the gym with them.

Sometimes, Billy thought, his dad seemed happy only when when he was talking about how
he
played basketball back when he was the star of their town’s high school team. Maybe that was why the first box he’d carried when he moved out had been the one with his trophies and plaques and team pictures in it, the pictures he’d taken down off the wall in his study.

More than anything else, that was what made Billy think his dad was never coming back to live with them. No matter how much “sorting out” both his parents said there was to do.

At least it was basketball season and at least his dad was still his coach, no matter how tough he could be sometimes. And at least there was a game today.

His dad had called on the phone about two minutes after his mom had left for the airport, as if he had some kind of weird radar going that let him know Mom was out of the house. He asked if Billy needed a ride to the Y, but Billy told him that Lenny’s mom was picking him up.

“That’s okay, right?” Billy said. Not sure these days what was okay and what wasn’t.

“Fine,” his dad said. “Are you okay, bud?”

“We’ve got a game, don’t we?” Billy said.

“I meant with all this.”

Billy, trying to make himself sound older, said, “I guess I’m still kind of sorting this stuff out like everybody else.”

There was a pause at his dad’s end of the phone, from his house on the other side of town. Then he said, “So how’s Ben?”

Ben was nine.