Hey, Coach! ch. 1

For Scotty fifth grade had been all saxophone, 12 new friends, after school program and rides in the car across town to some such new lesson or practice or meeting nearly every hour on the hour.  A little brother who was so annoying that that mom finally let Scotty start to sit up front in the SUV, even though it might have been a year too early, nobody would tell.  When they finally got home at night, mom disappeared into the kitchen and rushed around the counter clinking dishes. Little brother watched some such new cartoon app on his own personal iPad, one that had become so greasy in fingerprints on the screen that you couldn't help but wonder if he ate right on top of it.  Dad travelled twice a month out of the country, some places with unusual names in Mexico and even South America.  When he first started for the battery company, it was the very thing that allowed Scotty and Little Brother to go to private school, and those places way down there in other parts of the world sounded warm and full of big palm trees.  Scotty often daydreamed of his dad sitting in shaded porches of big buildings sipping strange and colorful drinks and automatically wanted to be an international businessman someday. Mother, though, no longer cooked, she didn't lay out any clothes in the morning, in winter, not much shoveling got done and all kinds of new workers had showed up to take care of all those little things that Dad used to do like second nature.  Scotty could hear them talk sometimes late at night.  Things are fine here, things are fine there.  Wish you were here, wish you were there.  Lots of wishes, Scotty thought, maybe he should have some of his own.  At night, after dinners, whatever they might be, Scotty pulled out his old outdoor basketball.  He'd inspect it to see if there were any new bald spots or wear marks.  He'd pump it up to get it easy to bounce and then, finally, he was somewhere he wanted to be, outside on his hoop and flat court his dad laid a couple of years ago, played some for awhile, then it all faded. Scotty had looked through some books on very fancy dribbling skills way back when he was in third grade.  How could he forget it? It was a book he pulled out in the LMC, and it had a picture of some random basketball player on the front.  Scotty wondered if he ever be able to dribble in between his legs like the pictures they showed.  The cross-over was deadly.  Behind the back serves a great purpose to reverse direction and avoid the steal.  Why didn't math make this much sense?  Once outside, the backyard became the stadium, lights shining down on him, a big loudspeaker in the background calling out his name and the names of his teammates in school.  He would shoot at least 200 shots every night.  He would not stop shooting from the baseline until he made two in a row, then it was alright to move to the next.  He watched the rotation on the ball even when his fingers got cold.  That was the hardest part for a kid, he decided, to hoist that ball all the way up there, 10 feet, and somehow keep a rotation.  Plays began to form his head as he shot and he might tell Wes to loop around his down screen, flash to the ball, I'll pass and we will give and go.  In these little court dreams, the rest of his teammates knew the plays as well and the offense worked to a rhythm hardly ever seen in any school, ever! The dream was usually broken when his mother's voice sounded from the back porch and before you knew it, there came Little Brother, bundled up, and dashing out to the court to "play some bakit ball."  One night, Scotty decided to stop ignoring Little Brother, he gave him a little ball that they had for a long time, and began to show him how to dribble.  Wouldn't it be more fun if he had someone to play with?