“Only the tournament. I’m in Bernie’s pool.” He looked slightly sheepish. “It’s a loyalty thing.”
“You’re both ridiculous,” Stella said. “Can you install this or not?”
Tyler got to work. He pulled the TV away from the wall, found the studs, and started measuring. Stella sat on Margo’s couch and watched her grandmother stand in the kitchen doorway pretending she wasn’t watching Tyler work with clear discomfort. Stella would bet Margo had never in her life let someone else handle a project in her house.
“Margo, sit down,” Stella said. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re hovering.”
Margo sat in the armchair. Then she got up and made tea nobody had asked for. Then she sat back down.
“So you and Bernie watch basketball and eat ice cream,” Stella said.
“His roommate from Michigan sends hot fudge you can’t get out here.” Margo picked up her tea and set it down again. “It’s nice to hear the crowd. That’s all. It’s just nicer when you can hear the applause.”
Stella looked at this woman—her grandmother, who had run a restaurant for fifty years, who watched the news and read books and hadn’t watched a movie in decades, so Stella had been told, who had now bought a soundbar so she could hear basketball crowds while eating ice cream with a man she’d been standing next to for half a century.
She thought about Sam in Sedona, who had a week with two granddaughters and spent it seeing one and not seeing the other. Who said “any time” like time had no limits. Who was maybe in a new town by now, following the light.
And here was Margo, buying a soundbar. Installing it in her living room. Making a place for someone to sit beside her and watch a game she didn’t understand yet.
Margo was watching the couch—not the TV, not Tyler behind it, not the soundbar going up on the wall. The couch. The spot where Bernie sat when he was here. Her face had the expressionStella had seen in her own prints, pinned to the darkroom wall—the soft, unguarded thing Margo didn't know her face was doing.
Stella didn't say anything. She filed it where she filed everything—carefully, without comment, for later.
Tyler finished the installation in twenty minutes. He turned it on and the room filled with sound—commentators talking about brackets, the squeak of sneakers on a court, the hum of a crowd waiting for tip-off.
Stella watched men run back and forth on a shiny wooden floor while a man in a suit yelled from the sideline.
“This is what all the fuss is about?” she said.
“Give it a chance,” Margo said, and she sounded like she was quoting someone.
“You’re all set,” Tyler said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Tell Bernie the sound is better from the couch.”
Margo walked them to the door. She hugged Stella—brief, the doorway kind. But she held on for an extra second.
“Thank you,” she said. “Both of you.”
They walked home in the last of the light, the neighborhood quiet, the ocean a few blocks over doing its evening thing.
“So,” Stella said. “Margo watches basketball now.”
“Apparently, Margo watches basketball now.”
“And you bet on it.”
“I bet on brackets. It’s different.”
“It’s not different.”
Tyler laughed. “I’ll give you the tutorial. It’s actually a great sport once you understand the strategy.”
“Hard pass.” Stella put her hands back in her pockets. “I’ll stick with cricket.”
“Nobody understands cricket.”
