Page 37 of On Merit Alone
I played around with the kids until their little asses tired me out. Liv could go all day, but Mads was starting to get fussy, and after a while, I could tell it was time for a bottle. When I finally decided to return her baby, I also gave my sister a belated hug. She laughed as she bounced Mads on her hip.
“Oh, hello, little brother. Nice to see you too,” she joked. “I thought for a second there you only tolerated me for access to my baby.”
I shrugged, not denying it, and she laughed harder. I laughed too, but I looked over my shoulder to see where the game was after my little intermission.
Mer—I mean, the Dynamite were up. It was tight, though, and it looked like they were playing Merit damn near every minute again.
Damn.
She couldn’t keep this up along with her constant extra practices. I’d hardly gotten her to start giving me those tentative laughs and almost smiles. I didn’t want them disappearing because she hurt herself from overdoing it.
I didn’t want to see her upset at all. I about killed Scottie formaking her look like that in the tunnel the other day. Like she’d been slapped or something. And then the fact that she didn’t know what to do with a gift… something about the whole thing didn’t sit right with me.
I had wanted to talk to her after the game, when I could finally pull my focus away from basketball enough to think about what happened in the tunnel clearly. But she was off to Minnesota by then and plus, I didn’t have her number. And maybe I wanted to hold off on asking my questions until after her game, just like I’d held off on mentioning what I noticed about her hesitating on her injury. I’d recognized the problem right off, but something told me that telling her directly before a game would throw her off.
“You know, Ira?” my sister started from beside me. She was moving around the kitchen counters while fixing up a bottle for her baby boy, but glancing at her, I could see her peeking over at me every so often. “I thought maybe you had a girl or something in the crowd yesterday?”
I slid her a glance. “Why?”
She shrugged and the hairs on my neck began to prickle. The girl could find a needle in a haystack when she wanted to. I wondered if she’d found Merit in the crowd of twenty thousand, but she wasn’t letting on to anything specific. “I dunno. Just seemed that way, with that smile and wave you gave at the end of the game.”
“I did not wave,” I groaned, covering my face. “And I smile all the time. I swear you and Dad are crazy.”
“We saw it too!” just about everyone in the room called. Even Livy piped up from her spot on the living room rug where she played with her blocks. “We saw’d it, Uncle I.”
She was just copying everybody else, but it still landed right where it was supposed to.
I groaned but shot a look at my sister. “Did you see anything else, perchance?”
Tipping her chin like she was thinking, she shook her dark head, her short, coily curls shaking along with it. “Hmm, no. What exactly should I be looking for?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. I hadn’t seen anything surface about the little two finger salute Merit had returned to me as she ducked her shoulders in a giggle. I hoped I wouldn’t. For her sake mostly, because people loved to speculate and blow things out of proportion when it came to my life and my business. But for my sake too, since that little motion had been only for me. And I wanted to keep it all to myself.
I also wanted to keep feeling the ghost of her fingers tugging on my shirt and telling me, “Good luck, Ira” even after she told the team the same thing. In her eyes, me and them were different somehow. While she was wishing them good luck, she was wishing something more for me.
It made me curious. It made me selfish. It made me want to see her again. Suddenly, I wanted to know what more Merit had in mind for me.
“Oh!” a chorus of grunts and hisses came from the other room. All the commotion pulled my attention back to the present and away from all the soft parts I was slowly discovering about Merit Jones. The guys were still watching the women’s game, their tone ringing alarm bells immediately in my head.
“What?” I asked, abandoning my sister and nephew and wandering into the living room as I zeroed in on the TV.
“Jones is down,” Dad said, leaning forward on his knees. Dad loved all things sports and was never one to discriminate on who or what was playing. Men, women, from basketball to tennis, he was in.
My heart picked up speed at his words. I rounded the couch and sat next to him, taking up the same position with my elbows leaned against my knees. “What do you mean, down?”
On the screen, a cluster of bodies congregated in one spot on thecourt. Multiple women in red and white circled around one spot on the floor. It was clear something was wrong. Sure we fell a lot in this sport, but when someone didn’t get up…
Was Merit not getting up?
“What happened?” I asked, hoping my voice didn’t come out in the hiss of urgency I thought it did.
“She went up for a layup and somebody knocked her over. When she landed she went down,” he explained.
That heart rate just kept on inclining. “Is it her knee again?”
“Dunno,” Dad said. We watched in silence as the commentator speculated the same thing and the crowd all wondered when Merit would get up.
What felt like hours of just waiting ticked by before we saw the group of tightly knit Dynamite players start to expand, and one Merit Jones being pulled up to her feet.
