CHAPTER FOUR #2
MAD TRIED TO TUCK IN THE ILL-FITTING GRAY T-SHIRT THAT READ LET’S GO , SOONERS ! in crimson and cream letters. After their meeting with Pep, Rube had bought both of them T-shirts when they had stopped at the university bookstore. He said it would be a nice way to support their sister as they made their way to Texas to see her first-round matchup, but Rube had guessed at her size, not bothering to ask, and now she had a shirt that made her look like she was wearing a parachute.
That morning, in a motel just outside of Austin, Texas, when she’d tried it on, she did the angriest twirl possible to show her displeasure to Rube, who seemed unbothered. “It will make a nice sleep shirt,”
he said, and Mad, trying not to yell, said, “But I’m not wearing it to bed. I’m wearing it to an NCAA tournament game in front of thousands of people.”
“Well, people are not going to be looking at us,”
he said, though Mad noticed that Rube’s shirt fit perfectly. “This is all about Pepper.”
“Yes, you’re right,”
Mad had said, but now, as they pulled into a parking lot near the Frank Erwin Center, she was irritated all over again. What she realized was that she didn’t want Pepper to see her and think, Oh, she’s clearly not a true fan of the Okla homa Sooners women’s basketball team, but she realized how insane that was. Pepper would not even see them, probably, and she would not care that Mad’s shirt was too big because Pepper probably would be more concerned with winning a basketball game. Mostly, Mad just didn’t like feeling any more uncomfortable than she already would be, filing into a huge arena to watch a sport that, truth be told, she didn’t exactly comprehend. But they were here, right? This is what a family did. They showed up for things they didn’t totally understand and wore uncomfortable clothes and they shouted your name nonstop because they wanted you to understand that, win or lose, they loved you. But, of course, maybe it would be weird for Pepper to know that her half siblings, who truthfully had met only a week or so previous, loved her.
Mad shook her head. She wouldn’t let her own weirdness ruin this moment. She didn’t have much experience with family but this is what you did. You showed them you cared. Not their dad, obviously. He would not be at the game, not shouting Pep’s name, not wearing some giant shirt that somehow seemed to be expanding in the heat of the Texas sun. He would be far away. So it was important that Mad and Rube were there in his absence. They had missed every single basketball game of Pep’s entire life up to this point, but here they were. And that had to mean something. Go, Sooners!
It was early afternoon and there wasn’t as much of a crowd as Mad had expected for a major athletic event. She remembered those games in Knoxville when the Vols had played football at Neyland Stadium and even the parking lot was raucous for hours before kickoff. This was more like a small academic conference on some esoteric subject, with everyone milling around and smiling politely, knowing that, even if they didn’t know you, they knew of you. There was one lady in the parking lot who was selling homemade merchandise for the game, and Mad stopped to look at one of the shirts draped over the hood of the woman’s pickup truck. It had a dog wearing an Oklahoma basketball uniform and a little cowboy hat standing on top of a basketball hoop with the back end of a redhawk sticking out of its mouth. It said boomer sooner in crimson letters. And there were women’s sizes, thank god.
“How much?”
Mad asked.
“Fifteen bucks,”
the lady said, and Mad paid her.
“Oh, how cool!”
Rube said, butting in. He laughed at the image. “Wait, who’s that dog?”
Rube asked the woman.
“That’s Top Daug,”
she said—like, duh —and didn’t elaborate, and Mad hoped that Rube would let it go. Of course they knew Top Daug. Top Daug was, perhaps, their favorite mascot of all time, and that’s why Mad was buying the shirt.
“Wait, is Top Daug the mascot for the Sooners?”
Rube asked. “A dog? I thought it was a … a Sooner.”
“He was the mascot,”
the lady said, and now Mad saw the little spark of fire flash in her eyes. Now Mad realized the mistake was engaging the woman, because she now opened up to Mad and Rube.
“He was the basketball mascot, but they retired him a few years ago, which was the dumbest thing ever. Now it’s Boomer and Sooner and they are—oh, lord—the worst.”
“Are they dogs?”
Rube asked.
“No!”
the woman shouted. “They’re horses.”
“Horses?”
Mad said, and regretted it instantly. “Oh, sorry, never mind.”
“Horses?”
Rube asked. “Why horses?”
“Well, they pull the Sooner Schooner,”
the woman explained, and Mad felt like she had dropped acid, but it just kept going, “and maybe that’s nice on a big football field, but that’s just not going to work on a basketball court.”
“Of course not,”
Rube said.
“Can’t have a giant wagon on that hardwood, you know?”
the woman said.
“Their hooves, too, I’d imagine,”
Rube offered.
“So, to me, Top Daug is still the mascot. And he always will be.”
“Amen,”
Rube said, and the woman actually gave him a high five.
Mad was amazed at how her brother was able to navigate these situations without fear.
His emotions certainly covered a wider range of possibilities than Mad.
She had witnessed the man cry more than once in a very limited span of time; other than her mom, she could not think of another human being who had ever seen her cry.
But he also laughed more, seemed genuinely thrilled by, say, a dog eating a bird to express athletic dominance.
So as she went back to the PT Cruiser to change into the new shirt, she thought maybe this would be good for both of them.
Rube’s mania would slightly expand Mad’s range of emotion, but Mad’s reticence, what she would call stoicism, would perhaps keep Rube from straying too far beyond the acceptable range of his own emotions.
Maybe this wouldn’t actually benefit either of them, but the point was that it wouldn’t hurt them.
They’d even each other out in a way that kept them safe.
That is, if they made it to California and their father.
Or stayed in touch after.
Perhaps it was best not to make long-term assumptions about their relationship. Perhaps it was best to just watch their sister’s game and hope for the best.
After they picked up their tickets and walked into the arena, gingerly going down the steps until they reached the fourth row at the center of the court, Mad was a little shocked at how few people there were.
The arena looked like it could hold at least ten thousand people, but there was nothing close to that with thirty minutes until tip-off.
There were huge gaps in the seating, but maybe it was because it was 10:30 in the morning and Texas, though close to Missouri and Oklahoma, required travel for casual fans.
What it meant was that the arena would be populated with only the kind of hardcore fan who loved women’s basketball so much that they scheduled their lives around it.
Mad imagined that was a likelier explanation than her and Rube, who had never attended a women’s basketball game in their life and were mostly here to get to see their previously unknown half sister.
Mad needed to stop comparing her own situation to other people in the day-to-day moments of her search for her missing family because it would never look good in her favor.
She should, even in her own brain, just let it go.
“That’s her!”
Rube shouted, pointing toward the court, where their sister, Pep, was casually draining three-pointers from the top of the key.
Rube was about to wave, but Mad stopped him. “She probably needs to focus,”
Mad told him, and he relented.
The court, however, was populated with so many people.
The players, of course, but also trainers and crew people and little kids who were tracking down stray shots and returning the basketballs to the players.
There were camera people and sideline reporters, so much activity in the service of this single game, and there was music blaring over the speakers, graphics flashing on the four giant screens hanging above the court.
There was the mascot for the opposing team, Rowdy the Redhawk, the bird being eaten whole by Top Daug on Mad’s shirt, standing awkwardly at the edge of the court, bouncing nervously in time to the music.
Mad wondered if it was a woman in the uniform, but imagined that, regardless of the sport, it was a man in the mascot suit.
She looked for Boomer and Sooner but didn’t see them anywhere.
But there was Pep, slouching with the kind of casual ease that Mad had noticed from young athletes, the ability to let their bodies completely relax because they were so confident that they could snap instantly back to readiness when the moment required it.
She was chewing gum, not talking to her teammates, just waiting until a ball made its way to her, magically summoned from some trainer or overeager kid, and then she shot, assessed the shot, and went right back to strolling around the court, testing its dimensions, finding the edges of what was hers and what was everyone else’s.
And then Rube’s cell phone rang, and both of them instinctually looked right at Pep, who, of course, was not holding a cell phone. “Hello,”
Rube said, and then Mad watched as his expression turned to one of great alarm, and he looked around the arena. “Yes, madam—or ma’am, sorry— Okay. Well, okay. I mean, she invited us. Chip? Ohio? No, okay, maybe we should talk after the—Okay, row two, oh, yes, I see you waving. You want me to— Oh, okay. No, there’s room. Good—”
And then Rube looked at Mad. “It’s Pep’s mom,”
he said, almost hissing. “She’s coming over.”
“Is she angry?”
asked Mad, looking across the court without spotting her. “Is she coming to beat us up?”
“It’s unclear,”
he answered. “She is concerned that we’re here. Oh, and Dad went by the name Chip with them.”
“Chip? Oh, that’s terrible.”
Her dad, who was a Chuck, did not make sense as a Chip. She imagined that for Rube, who knew his dad as the more formal Charles, especially could not imagine him as a Chip. Their dad, never making sense the minute he left your life.
“She’s across the court, so we have some time because she’ll—Okay, she’s walking across the court. Just striding right across the court and there’s no security or anything.”
They noticed that Pep had turned to see her mom walking onto the court, but she immediately went back to shooting after her mom waved her off. Pep’s mom was a tall woman with brown hair styled like Jane Fonda in Klute , a shag cut from the seventies, and appeared to be in her late forties. She was wearing a crimson cardigan sweater with an OU patch sewn on the back, with white pants that had a red stripe down the side. She looked like Mrs. Claus in a hip movie about Christmas. And then she was in front of them.
“You’re Chip’s kids,”
she said, a statement of fact. “I can see it right off.”
“We’re Charles Hill’s children, yes,”
Rube said. “I’m Reuben and this is Madeline.”
“Mad,”
Mad interjected.
“Nicknames, of course,”
the woman said. “Well, I’m Cathy. Cathy Permalee. And Chip was my husband. He’s Pep’s father.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,”
Rube offered.
“Terrible timing, Reuben,”
she said, looking past him now and fixing her gaze on Mad, who stiffened at the scrutiny. “I was prepared to really hate y’all,”
Cathy continued in an accent that seemed to blend southern and midwestern inflections and was hypnotic to Mad.
“Oh,”
Mad said, not sure how to respond.
“But I do like that shirt,”
Cathy said, pointing to Mad’s shirt.
“Oh,”
Mad said, looking down. “Top Daug, yeah.”
“God, I loved that dog,”
Cathy said, looking out toward the court, wistful, as if hoping that the dog would rappel down from the ceiling of the arena at any moment. She snapped back to the situation. “So, Pep, as you can understand, is under just a crazy amount of pressure, okay? Don’t know if either of you played Division One college athletics—”
“Not us!”
Rube offered.
“Well, it’s real stressful. This is the culmination of Pep’s entire career at Oklahoma. Her entire basketball career, which, truth be told, began with her damn dad, so there’s a lot going on in her head. And she needs nothing going on in her head.”
“She invited us,”
Rube said. “We didn’t want to impose.”
“Yes, she told me,”
Cathy said, shaking her head. “She doesn’t have siblings. Not even cousins, actually. She’s a little closed off, emotionally, I mean. Had to be, to be as good as she is at basketball. But y’all got her at a weird moment.”
“We’ll not make any trouble,” Mad said.
“Any more trouble, thank you,”
Cathy replied. “But, she also said that y’all asked if her dad had ever talked to me since he left.”
“He talked to our moms,”
Rube said. “And we didn’t know.”
“Well, he talked to me. Every once in a while. My birthday sometimes. But I never told Pep. It wouldn’t have killed her or anything. She’s unbelievably tough, but it’s just not something she needed to know. And so she asked, and I lied. And I’m gonna keep lying, at least until something changes that makes me have to tell the truth.”
“Okay, sorry,”
Rube replied.
“So drop that, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am,”
Mad offered.
“And she said y’all told her that you were on some kind of journey to see Chip? To track him down and confront him?”
“We are,”
Rube said.
“And you invited Pep?”
“Yes, we did. We didn’t know about the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship. We were just stopping by to see all of his kids.”
“So there’s more than y’all?”
she asked them, and they nodded.
“At least one more,”
Rube said.
“After us?”
Cathy asked, and they both nodded again.
“Chip,”
she said softly.
“I figured as much, but it still stings.
Okay, anyway, Pep will not be going on that trip, okay? I am not going to keep her away from you two.
If she wants you to be in her life, that’s fine.
But she’s not driving across the damn country to meet her father after ten years.
Not going to happen.”
“Okay,”
they both said.
She took a deep breath and nodded. She observed them a little longer. “He had two whole lives before me,”
she said, but not to them, “and more after.”
She then straightened and smiled at them. “Y’all like basketball?”
she then asked.
“So much!”
Rube replied.
“Well, nice to meet you,”
Cathy offered, and then, without waiting for a reply, she strode confidently back to her seat across the court.
When Mad looked up, she noticed that Pep, who had finished warming up, was watching them.
Mad didn’t know what to do.
She waved.
Pep did not wave back.
Mad sat down and leafed through the program, which listed the stats and the players and all kinds of information and she appended to it what she had learned in the hotel room for the last two days, reading newspapers about the Lady Sooners.
Pep was the only senior on the team, first-team All-Big-12 for two years in a row, the team’s leading scorer and had set the all-time record for threes in the Big 12.
She was the captain of the team, but there was also a center named Daedra London who was a freshman and was already a star in the making and, like Pep, a Gatorade High School Player of the Year.
She had just won Big 12 Player of the Year and was second in points and led the team in rebounds and had recorded a double-double in every single game of the season, which was apparently a record for a freshman.
This duo was the reason that Oklahoma was a dark horse to win the entire tournament, even though they were a four seed.
The Redhawks of Southeast Missouri State had needed a good run at the end of the season to even get into the tournament, but they had the leading rebounder in the country and the entire starting five were seniors.
The Sooners were overwhelming favorites, and Mad was happy that they’d showed up for a first-round matchup.
She could not even imagine what would have happened if they’d appeared at the finals of the National Championship, holding up a sign that said, pepper, we are your half brother and sister from the father you haven’t seen in ten years and there are more of us and we’re going to go confront him and would love for you to join us in the pt cruiser while she shot a free throw to tie the game.
“Here we go!”
Rube said, nudging Mad, and they both clapped for the Sooners.
The arena had filled up a bit, but it was still so surprising to Mad how underattended it was, how little attention anyone seemed to pay to women’s basketball.
And she felt a little indignant that women always lived in a tier below men and then realized that this was the first time she had ever seen a women’s basketball game and, less than a week ago, she could not have named a single women’s basketball player in the entire history of the sport.
Daedra London easily won the tip-off, batting the ball over to Pep, who casually dribbled across half court, gesturing to her teammates.
She passed the ball, immediately darted away from her defender, used a screen from another teammate just as she got the ball back, and she put up a perfect, high-arcing shot from beyond the three-point line.
It looked good from the moment it left her hand and she was already setting her feet to get back on defense when the ball just barely caught the edge of the rim and the ball rattled around the hoop and bounced back into play.
Daedra went up for the rebound, fighting with the Lady Redhawks defender, and as she came down with the ball, Daedra landed on the other player’s foot and her ankle turned in such a gruesome way that even from the fourth row, Mad knew that something very bad had happened.
Daedra collapsed to the ground, already yelling in pain, a time-out was called, and there was dead silence in the arena as trainers ran onto the court.
Pep, still stunned by the miss, looked toward the bench, her coach, and then after a few seconds passed and she realized that her teammate was injured, she huddled with her other teammates as Daedra struggled to get up, supported by two trainers.
The crowd clapped that she was able to move, but Mad felt like, after what she’d seen happen, maybe they shouldn’t let her hobble to the bench, then past the bench, then through a tunnel, and then into the locker room.
“She’s not coming back, I don’t think,”
Mad said to Rube, who nodded.
“That was … auspicious,”
Rube offered.
Even after the game restarted, the crowd seemed dead, afraid to cheer in case it might still be attached to the horrific injury they’d witnessed. And in that emptiness, the Lady Redhawks pushed the pace, driving to the bucket at will. And the Sooners, probably still thinking about Daedra, couldn’t get back on track. Pep missed her next five shots, committed a dumb foul trying to steal the ball, and then missed three more shots.
“She’s missed nine straight shots,”
Rube offered, as if maybe the official scorekeepers for the game might not realize what was happening.
“Well, I think she’s realizing that her best teammate is probably out of the rest of the tournament, so I’m sure she’s trying too hard to make up for it.”
“And, well,”
Rube said, “maybe us showing up?”
“Rube, please,”
Mad replied. “Please don’t. I’m already feeling like shit, okay?”
“Well, I just wanted to put it out there. It’s hard not to think about it.”
“All she has to do is hit one shot,”
Mad said, and she felt her entire body begin to tense. Her chest felt tight, and she had to keep taking these deep inhalations to try and get air into her body. There was no way she could have ever done this, played in front of this many people. But she also knew that this was the tenderness of wanting a person you care about to avoid this kind of pain. For the first time in her memory, she thought about what it would be like to have a child, to have that child tell you that they wanted to play basketball, then having to attend years and years of games, each time hoping your child doesn’t get hurt or ruin themselves. And maybe you felt that same tension just watching them go to school, to the arcade with friends, sitting in their room with their headphones on. Maybe every single moment of loving someone you helped make was connected to this low-level terror that hurt your heart. Is this why their father left them?
In the time it took Mad to consider all of this, to nearly have an anxiety attack in this arena while Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam”
played on the loudspeakers during a time-out, Pep had missed four more shots, picked up two more fouls, and was sent to the bench by her coach, an intense woman in an all-white pantsuit with electric-blonde hair who spent the entire time-out screaming at Pep, who took it without flinching, staring straight ahead. When the half ended, the Sooners were losing by twenty-five points and Pep was 0-13. They watched as the Sooners players limped back to the locker rooms, displaying the most aggressively defeated posture that Mad had ever seen, while the Lady Redhawks looked like they were moonwalking off the court.
And as if summoned by dark magic, while Rube was using the restroom, Cathy Permalee appeared right behind Mad, which almost made Mad scream when she turned to find the woman standing over her.
“Sorry,”
Cathy said. “You’re pretty darn easy to scare.”
“It’s been a weird week,”
Mad lamely offered.
“Tell me about it,”
Cathy said, sitting in Rube’s empty seat.
“I’m so sorry,”
Mad said again.
“Lots of time left,”
Cathy said. “Pep is resilient. She’s driven. She’ll figure it out. They might not win. Losing Daedra is pretty damn bad, but it won’t stay this bad, I’ll tell you that for sure.”
“I hope so,” Mad said.
“So my husband was your dad—shoot, sorry— is your dad. Pep’s father, Chip, is your father …”
“Chuck,”
Mad said, filling in the gap that Cathy left.
“I’m not going to get used to that,”
Cathy said. “Chip was not a Chuck.”
“Same here, but, you know, the opposite,”
Mad replied.
“He was such a strange man. He was not cruel, except for, of course, leaving me and my child and never coming back. He was a good man, and he loved us. Do you understand?”
“I do,”
Mad admitted. “I feel the same way. For the time he was with us, he was a good dad. Honestly, he was the best dad. I just don’t understand why he left.”
“I don’t, either.”
“Pep said that he was a basketball coach?”
“Oh, yes, he was. He was very good at it. He coached the women’s basketball team at Pocola High and they won a state championship his third year at the school. And he coached Pep’s rec league teams when she was a little girl.”
“He was a successful basketball coach?”
Mad asked. “Because, I don’t know if you know, but he’d never played basketball before he came to Oklahoma.”