Chapter 25: What His Mother Carried
Davon's mother came home on a Friday night, on a bus from Atlanta that arrived after dark. Davon had been watching the road from the porch for an hour, and when the bus doors sighed open and she stepped down with her bag over her shoulder, he ran to meet her before he remembered he was fourteen and supposed to be calm about such things.
Her name was Denise, but Rose called her Nise, and Davon just called her Mama, the way he had since he was small. She hugged him hard, and then she hugged Rose longer, the way people hug when they have missed each other in the middle of ordinary life.
"I missed the Marietta game," she said, as they walked up the path. "I watched the clip on my break. Maya's video, the one where Marcus walks out to the mound. A nurse on my floor asked me if that was my boy."
"It was," Davon said, grinning.
Inside, Rose had cooked fried chicken and greens, and the kitchen smelled like Sunday even though it was Friday. They ate at the table, and Mama told them about the night shifts, about patients who called her by the wrong name and then apologized, about the long bus rides and the short sleeps. She did not complain. She just told it, plain, the way she told everything.
After dinner, while Rose washed dishes, Mama sat with Davon on the porch. The night air was warm, and the crickets were loud in the grass.
"I want to talk to you straight," Mama said. "I am proud of you. I was proud when you mowed that field, and I am proud now. But I need you to hear this: baseball is second. School is first. I did not leave you here with your grandmother so a game could take the place of your education."
Davon nodded. He had heard this before, from Rose, in different words. Hearing it from his mother, after a night shift and a bus ride, made it land differently.
"I know, Mama," he said. "I do my homework on the bus. Beasley checks. He says if my grades slip, I sit. I believe him."
She studied his face. "Good," she said. "Because a fastball does not pay for college, and a sore arm does not write an essay. I want you to have choices, baby. Not just one door, but many."
Davon thought about the development programme letter that had not yet arrived, and about the scouts in the bleachers, and about all the talk of futures. He had not told Mama about any of it yet, because he wanted this night to be simple. But he knew he could not keep it simple forever.
"Mama," he said, slowly, "what if something comes? A camp, or a programme. Would you let me go?"
She was quiet for a moment, looking out at the dark yard. "If it is fair," she said at last. "If it keeps you in school, and if it does not ask you to be a man before you are done being a boy. Then we talk about it, together, all three of us. Not a decision made by a stranger with a clipboard."
Rose came out with two glasses of sweet tea, and the talk turned to other things: the price of bus tickets, the new nurse on Mama's floor, the way Davon's voice had dropped a little since spring. It was ordinary, and Davon found he liked ordinary more than he used to. Fame, if that was what the video had been, was loud and strange. This was quiet and his.
Later, before bed, Mama stood in the doorway of his room and looked at the cleats by the door, the notebook on the desk, the library book with its spine cracked from use. "You have built something good here," she said softly. "With a tennis ball and a wall and a grandmother who does not miss a thing."
Davon laughed. "And a mother who works nights so I can have it."
She kissed the top of his head, the way she had when he was small enough to carry. "That is what mothers carry," she said. "Not just bags on a bus. The weight, so you can run lighter."
After she left, Davon lay awake for a while, thinking about what she had carried and what Rose carried, and about his own job, which was simpler than he sometimes made it: go to school, do the work, throw the ball well, and come home. The rest, the scouts and the programmes and the noise, would have to fit around that, not the other way around. He fell asleep to the sound of his mother and grandmother talking low in the kitchen, two women keeping a house steady, and he dreamed, not of stadiums, but of the wall behind the duplex, and a tennis ball coming back to his hand, again and again.