Page 69 of ClickBack

“They’ve talked to me.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you can play.”

I wait for the rest. He looks away from the screen, and for a moment I hear something on his television. Then it stops. He has muted it.

“Ask what you called to ask, Jay.”

“How would you feel if I came?”

“Which answer you want?”

“Yours.”

He rubs a hand over his face. I want to take the question back, which would be another way of leaving him out of it.

“I’m not mad,” he says. “I’m also not throwing confetti. It took me a long time to be Javon down here.”

“I remember.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you can make it easy by understanding it.”

I look at him on the screen. He has said harder things to me, but usually with enough anger that I could respond to the way he said them. Tonight he just looks tired of a problem I can’t deny having helped create, even if I never wanted to.

“All right,” I say.

“You wouldn’t come trying to make it your team. I believe that. People don’t need your permission to do it for you.”

I think of the reporter outside the locker room. His championship night. My possible address.

“They already started,” I say.

“Yeah.”

I let him have the word without asking him to soften it. My first instinct is to name the things I would do differently, the questions I would refuse, the ways I could keep the attention where it belongs. He knows I cannot keep that promise. So do I.

“Tell me about playing together,” I ask. “Leave everybody else out for a minute.”

He looks back at me. “You’re still going to yell when I miss you on a cut?”

“If you miss me.”

“Then there’s that.”

I smile. He leans back, thinking.

“We need somebody who can get the defense talking early. Somebody who’ll make the extra pass without needing to be congratulated for it.”

“You could’ve led with that.”

“I’m not recruiting you.”

“No.”