He still drove me to games and practices, asking afterwards, “Well, madam, what do ye fancy?” We liked the Original Tommy’s on Beverly. He always got the chili cheese burger and I always got the chili cheese fries. The fries came in a little checkerboard boat that quickly grew soaked with orange grease. Afterwards, in the parking lot, my father smoked cigarettes and spoke of Ballymagorry, Sunday roasts at his grandmother’s cottage, the tureen of mashed turnips, and the soft wad of butter made from a pitcher of cream left on the counter overnight. His eye was on a bit of land on the banks of the Foyle. Four ewes. We’d see then, wouldn’t we? In Ballymagorry the sun was mild when it showed, the air clean at the back of your throat. LA was only tolerable at night, though this wasn’t night, was it, a sky that glowed, not a star strong enough to show its face. In Bally-magorry the stars were like God’s silvery dust blown against the black.
More than anything, he wanted to go back. But Ireland was nothing but muddy miles of sheep shit and damp, concrete checkpoints with the English pointing their guns at you. Magic Johnson didn’t cruise the streets there, girls didn’t play basketball there, and Callie and her hair dilemmas would be five thousand miles away. In the mornings on my way to school, I walked past stucco walls overflowing with bougainvillea and white jasmine as the rising sun turned the skyscrapers rosy gold. Even the shiny underside of the palm fronds was rosy gold. LA belonged to me, and I would not bear losing it.
One day, about a month after she moved out, my mother phoned, asking me to Venice Beach on Saturday afternoon. We might do something together, she said. She missed me, she said.
My father dropped me off and I met her near the start of the boardwalk. She looked different. Bonier.
“Aoife, I want to spend time with ye, but I am sorry, I only want to do certain things.”
“Like what?”
“Lie on the beach, walk on the beach, or rollerblade.”
I did not want to do a single one, but I picked rollerblading. “Right,” my mother said, turning towards the boardwalk, “let’s get my skates.” Her skates? She lived in a single room in a crumbling blue-painted building facing the beach. On the back of the door hung a pair of nursing uniforms, and by the head of her mattress lay a smooth gray stone. The skates were in the corner, hidden beneath a folded blanket. A single window opened onto a cement courtyard.
“I don’t lock the window,” my mother said. “So when they come to steal they won’t break it. They haven’t figured out yet that I have no possessions.”
I picked up the smooth stone. “I hold that when I meditate,” she said.
Her rollerblades were shiny black, a neon pink stripe down the side. At the rental place, I traded my birthday Converse for a pair of skates and we set off. I wobbled at first, but my mother was expert, gliding in and about the slowpoke tourists. For an hour we skated, me about ten feet behind. Her caboose, I realized, was the same as mine. I was following my own caboose. I started to think that eventually I might like skating, though it wasn’t long before a sunburn started on my forehead.
We agreed to meet again the next week.
My father did not ask how it went.
The first game of the tournament opened as did all Archdiocese games—both teams gathered midcourt, one player—for us, always Scholastica—in the center, eyes uplifted, leading the group in a recitation of the Our Father.
Our opponent was Our Lady of Loretto. Their thing was speed. Entirely Salvadoran, not one of them topped five feet, so even as they badgered Callie’s every step, they couldn’t stop her. After ten minutes, we were ahead twenty to nothing. Coach Jenkins sent the eighth graders to the bench, allowing Delmy, the only seventh grader on the starting five, to run the offense.
The lead quickly evaporated, the Salvadorans running rings around the younger girls.
“Next year Vibiana gonna suck,” Junie said. Delmy couldn’t handle the trap, or if she did manage to break it, nobody else did anything with the ball except stare at it like it was a ticking time bomb. In the second half, the starters opened and the game was called once we were thirty points up.
Afterwards, Coach Jenkins yelled at us for giggling on the bench. Did we think this tournament was a joke, did we think he was a joke? We might not be giggling once we got our butts knocked out of the tournament. We might be crying. Maybe that’s what we wanted. Was it?
In the next round we faced our divisional rivals, Blessed Sacrament. We hated their guts and they felt exactly the same way about us.
Blessed Sacrament’s team was anchored by burly twins, tough girls taking no shit, girls who wouldn’t think twice about propelling the sharp points of their elbows into your front teeth. The afternoon of the game, their side of the gym was packed with families crammed thigh to thigh, abuelitas passing out tortas de carnitas, and little kids bopping each other on the head with big balloon hammers. Behind their bench, a single row had been left completely empty, and one minute before tipoff, twelve nuns in full black habit filed in and sat down.