CHAPTER FOUR #4
the woman asked, which Pep allowed), an order of onion rings, a grilled cheese sandwich, a Coke, and a strawberry milkshake. “Thank you,”
Pep said to Rube, and then she went to an empty booth and sat sideways, taking up the entire bench, propping her head against the window.
Rube looked at the cashier and said, “One small Coke, please,”
and Mad felt like she should order food so Pep didn’t feel strange, so she ordered some curly fries, and Rube paid and they both turned to Pep, who still seemed dazed by the events of the day. Mad tried to calculate every single thing that had happened to her since the morning, and it was overwhelming, so strange that eating a ridiculous amount of fast food in a booth with your newly discovered family was not even at the top of the list.
Mad also considered just how young Pep was, only twenty-one years old, and realized that Rube, at forty-four, could have been her father. She hadn’t done the math on it, and with all the things she had learned recently, she wasn’t even sure if she knew how old her father really was. He could have been some bush-league Greek god or a vampire. You had to keep an open mind, not adhere too closely to what you thought was true, when it came to her father. You had to accept that your father might have been an ageless con artist who had sold his soul to the devil. Anything was possible.
But if she did the math correctly, her father was twenty-three when Rube was born, and thirty-four when she was born, which meant that he had been—oh, god—forty-five when Pep was born. And there were more kids! At least one more. Even if Mad had started at twenty-three, she did not have the ability to leave her family and set up new ones for the rest of her natural life. There would have been a biological cut-off point if she had been the one having the children. And she wouldn’t have attempted it, even if it were possible, as evidenced by the fact that she was thirty-two years old and standing in Dan’s Hamburgers in Austin, Texas, with her half siblings, no children of her own, living with her mom on a farm surrounded by chickens, sleeping in her childhood bed.
“We have to go over there,”
Rube said, “even if you’re scared of her.”
“I’m not scared of her.”
“I am,”
he said. “Though I was also a little scared of you when we first met.”
“She’s scarier than me,”
Mad admitted.
Just then, Pep looked up at them and arched her eyebrow, as if knowing they were talking about her, but, like, why wouldn’t they be? Who else would they be talking about other than the girl who literally hopped into their still-moving car and asked them to kidnap her?
“You go on over,”
Rube said. “I’m going to wait for the food to be called.”
“I think they might bring it—”
“I’ll just wait for it,”
he said. “Go on.”
Right when Mad sat down, Pep said, “I’m going to be honest with you,”
and Mad nodded so that Pep could continue. “I’m honestly, like, trying to make sure this isn’t a dream.”
“I don’t think it is. I mean—oh, god—it’s not a dream. Okay? This is real.”
“I keep thinking that maybe I died when I went back to my dorm, right before you guys called me. I think that maybe the elevator collapsed and I’m dead and everything that happened after is, like, my body making peace with it.”
Pep looked completely and totally emotionless as she was saying this, like she was testing the limits of reality and was not going to freak out over her own death if she didn’t have to. “And so meeting you guys and learning about my dad and playing in the tournament and Daedra breaking her ankle and losing that game and getting in the car with you and sitting at this restaurant, it’s all just a dream. I know you were worried about me on the bridge, but actually I was kind of thinking about it then. And I was like, how would I know?”
Mad was about to console her sister, but then she thought for a second. She remembered that moment when the PT Cruiser drove to the farm. Maybe, in the seconds before Rube appeared, she’d had a brain embolism and died. And that would mean that all this was her brain making peace with it. And Rube had come and told her this story about their dad and then met their sister and traveled to see her play in a huge arena in a NCAA tournament game and now here she was. And—oh, god—maybe Rube had died when he’d set fire to his father’s books, and they were all part of his death spiral dream.
“I’m pretty sure this is real,”
Mad finally said, but she had never sounded less sure of anything in her entire life.
Rube showed up with a tray piled high with food that was almost entirely for Pep. “What are you two talking about?” he asked.
“Just getting to know each other,”
Mad said, and Pep nodded.
Rube pushed the food over to Pep, who immediately took the largest bite of a burger that Mad had ever witnessed, and the hickory sauce that drenched the burger spilled down Pep’s chin like she’d bitten into a blood capsule, and Pep smiled, chewing slowly, nodding in affirmation of something that seemed so important.
“I think this is real,”
Pep finally said to Mad, and then she wiped the sauce off her chin with a napkin.
“What’s real?”
Rube asked. “The burger?”
“Yeah,”
Pep said. “The burger is real. I know it is. I know it now.”
“I was over there for, like, eight minutes,”
Rube said. “Did something happen?”
“Did you guys not order anything to eat?”
Pep said, now suspicious again.
Mad reached for the curly fries. “No! I got these curly fries. I’m eating.”
“I wasn’t hungry,”
Rube said, confused.
“Try a fry,”
Mad said to Rube, pushing a fry in his face, and Rube ate it.
“Mmmm,”
he said, as if trying to decipher from Mad’s facial expressions what was going on. “That’s real, yes.”
The burger was gone, and Pep had moved on to the onion rings, alternating between sips of the Coke and the shake.
When Pep finished her shake, took a deep breath, and leaned back in the booth, she then told them about her dad.
He’d come to Oklahoma and was doing community outreach for a church, doing construction work, working in kitchens, and he met her mother, Cathy, who was a waitress at her parents’ diner, which actually wasn’t that different from this one that they were now sitting in.
And they got married, and then her mom and dad got a Sonic franchise, and it did well, and then her dad, who had been a star player in high school, started coaching youth basketball in the area and ended up getting a job at the little high school in Pocola when the head coach had a heart attack and retired in the middle of the season.
Pep was smiling now, talking about him.
She told them how he completely changed the way the Lady Chiefs played basketball, getting rid of all the set shots and stationary plays and instituted a wildly aggressive and attacking style of play that was a little flashy, teaching the girls to do no-look passes and fallaway jumpers and cutting quickly to the rim and doing finger rolls.
He had the center sometimes play as a point guard.
Pep said she would come to all the practices when she was four and five and six and the girls all treated her like royalty because her dad had led them to their first winning season in six years.
She said that her mom kept buying more Sonic franchises, and she now had eleven, and that meant they had a lot of money, lived well, and their dad was coaching and it was a good life.
He won a state championship when Pep was eight, and then, less than a year later, before the next season started, he was gone.
She came home from grade school and her mom said that their dad left a note that he had to go away.
“And Mom,”
she continued, “who I think was as clueless as I was, was getting all these questions from people because, you know, he was a big deal in our little town, and she finally said, after three months, that my dad was in rehab and that he was going to then spend a year working on a ranch in Wyoming to try and stay sober.
And I never understood why she’d make up a lie like that, because my dad didn’t even drink that much, but now I guess it was easier to say this bad thing instead of saying, like, ‘my husband left us without warning and we don’t know where he is and I’m realizing I don’t even know all that much about him.’ And then my mom admitted that she and my dad had never actually been married.
Like, they were just living together.
She said my dad didn’t believe in marriage, that he’d had a really bad first marriage a long time ago when he was young and it hadn’t lasted, and so he didn’t want to do it again.
And my mom was actually okay with this, partly because she was an independent lady and always had been and didn’t want him to have ownership of her businesses.
I never knew.
They celebrated their anniversary, but it was just the day they met.
I guess they just kind of forgot?”
So the only person he’d ever actually married was Rube’s mom.
And he was, perhaps, still married to her.
Well, no, she was dead.
He was a widower.
If he was still alive.
It made Mad so confused to think about it.
Pep took another breath; it was clear that she hadn’t talked about this.
Of course not.
Neither had Mad.
Neither had Rube, except to his therapist and, Mad allowed, his private detective.
It was strange, but it was almost easier to tell the story of their dad when you knew that every version ended the same way.
“And Mom was emphatic that if my dad didn’t want to be with us, then we wouldn’t think about him or waste any time feeling bad about it.
And she was good at it, or it looked like it to me.
But I did want to feel bad about it, you know? And I loved basketball because he’d made me love basketball, and it wasn’t like I was going to stop just because he’d left.
I was so good at it.
So I don’t know.
I guess I just had to pretend he’d never existed.
And no one in town asked about it because it was just so insane that my dad had left us and never come back.
I don’t know how to explain it.”
“We get it,”
Rube said.
“And we’re really going to find him?”
Pep asked.
“He’s in California,”
Rube said. “At least, that’s what I think.”
“This is so weird,”
she said. “But, like, you said there are other kids?”
“Yes,”
Rube said, “there’s another kid in Utah. He was in Utah after he … you know … after he left you.”
“So we’re going to go see him?”
Pep asked.
“I think so,”
Rube said. “It’s tricky. I mean, he’s still a kid, you know? We can’t, like, take him with us. But we can meet him and his mom and, like, let them know what’s going on.”
“That feels pretty heavy,” Pep said.
“I guess it is,”
Rube allowed. And then Mad realized that they would be knocking on the door and asking to talk to a child. Three adults standing on the porch, explaining that they all had the same dad but that he had different names and different professions and how would they not get arrested? She’d been so focused on Pep, the terror of meeting someone and telling them the truth. She hadn’t even expected any of this to work. But they had to be careful now. They were getting closer and closer to the blast impact of their father, people who were still getting over the fact that he had left them.
“We gotta, like, call the mom,”
Pep said. “We have to get permission, you know?”
“I mean, yes, of course,”
Rube said. “We will call her.”
“But not like you guys called me,”
Pep told them. “Because that was fucked up. You had clearly not practiced. You gotta practice, you know?”
“We’ll practice,”
Rube said, his skin blushing so hard and Mad realized that, of course Rube had not thought this through. They would practice. They would go through the proper channels. They would have a parent or guardian present at all times. Maybe they could use puppets or something?
“Maybe I should do it,”
Pep said. “You guys are, no offense, older. I think the mom will handle it better if I talk to her.”
“Well, these are all good points,”
Rube allowed, “and we can figure it out later.
But we should probably get back to the hotel.
It’s been, good lord, such a long day.”
Mad remembered that Pep had no luggage, and she wondered if Pep would feel weird sharing clothes with her.
She wouldn’t ask right now.
They would figure it out.
Every step of the way, even if there were awkward moments and disaster and everything seemed doomed, they would work together and somehow they’d get to where they needed to be.
There was, Mad was realizing, strength in numbers.
HER NEWLY DISCOVERED HALF SISTER HAD OFFERED TO SHARE CLOTHES with her, but Pep preferred having her own wardrobe.
And this was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances, but Pep also had to admit that she wasn’t used to sharing.
On the court, yes, as a teammate in basketball, she was selfless and performed her specific role with intense focus, but in her own life, what was hers was hers alone.
She was, or had been until just now, an only child.
So, no, she did not want to borrow Mad’s clothes, which were nothing but denim and flannel and a gigantic Oklahoma Sooners T-shirt and another one that only reminded her of the intense failure of the last collegiate basketball game of her entire life.
And, even if she wanted to share the socks and panties of a woman she had just met, she needed a toothbrush, right? It was a good thing, she decided, to assert some individuality within this new dynamic, to demand some basic human privileges so it didn’t feel like she was joining a cult.
Pep felt bad because it wasn’t her siblings’ fault that she had jumped into their car without her travel bag.
It wasn’t their fault that she had run off without even taking her wallet.
She wished she’d at least remembered her iPod and headphones so she could listen to music in the car when they drove to Utah to meet another sibling.
She had wanted to call her mom again and ask her to wire her some money, or to call a teammate and ask them if they remembered to grab her duffel bag from the locker room when they left and maybe they could meet her somewhere in the western United States and return her ID and credit cards to her.
But that would mean answering the numerous calls from all of these people and explaining what was going on, what she was feeling, why she was doing what she was doing.
She had no idea why she was doing this.
She had no idea what was going on.
To admit this to the people in her life who most cared about her was so unpleasant that she decided it was better to beg her siblings for money so she could buy some sweatpants.
Before she had called Rube and Mad, standing on that bridge, Pep had called her own mother to say that she was going to find her dad.
And her mom, who was so capable and pragmatic, tried to explain why this was a bad idea, that she had just experienced the end of her college basketball career and she was struggling to come to terms with that.
She called what Rube and Mad were doing “a road trip”
and even though she kind of hated those two weird people who had appeared on her college campus, she didn’t appreciate her mom thinking they were two weird people.
It seemed unfair that after the game had ended, this crushing disappointment, her brother and sister got to jump in a car and go find their dad together, and she had to go back to Oklahoma and sit in a crowded lecture hall with kids who didn’t even really care about women’s basketball if it didn’t result in a championship that they could celebrate with couch burning and drinking.
She would be all alone, wondering where they were, if they had found their dad.
And so she told her mom that she was going with them, and she spoke as harshly as she’d spoken to her mother in years, and it made her mother relent, to make Pep promise to be careful, to call her with updates.
And Pep had agreed because she wanted to get off the damn phone with her mom and find Rube and Mad.
And she had not called her back.
While Mad stayed behind to talk to her own mom on the phone, like any good daughter would, considering their moms were the ones who had not run off and started a series of new families, Pep and Rube went to a mall, and she quickly picked out a wardrobe that wasn’t too expensive and provided enough options to allow for all the new experiences she would be walking into.
The key was comfort, flexibility, so that if she had to jump right back out of that moving car or run across the vast desert plain to chase down their half brother, or get into a fistfight with her dad, she was ready for it.
And she was grateful that Rube, who was paying for all of this, didn’t seem to think any of this was weird and in fact seemed fairly excited about it.
He acted like it was an important milestone, to take your half sister to a store for clothes and then to a drugstore for tampons and a toothbrush and a hairbrush and then to an electronics store for a charger for her phone.
Each time, when the cashier rang up her purchases and Rube handed over his credit card, Pep said, “I’ll pay you back,”
and Rube just smiled and nodded, and Pep thought that, no, she probably wouldn’t pay him back.
Her presence was the payment, right?
She thought about her dad all the time, but it was because she thought about basketball all the time.
Her fundamentals, at such an early age, had been shaped by the calm voice of her dad, who never shouted at his players or denigrated their abilities.
She loved that, as a little kid, the way the older girls respected her dad, listened to him.
Even now, in high-stakes college games, after having been coached by top-flight AAU and high school and college coaches, she found that she fell back on the things her father had taught her.
It was why, when he left, she had felt so confused, so distraught.
He loved basketball.
She was so fucking good at basketball.
Why wouldn’t he stick around to see her play? And when he’d left, what had also confused Pep was that he didn’t take anything with him that she thought would have mattered.
His huge binders of plays and strategies, his books on basketball theory, his freaking whistle that the girls had bought him, plated in gold, when they won state.
All of it he left behind.
And for a few years, she would pore over those plays, drawn up in his own precise handwriting, and she remembered how much he loved this, charting out the flow of a game and then seeing how it worked in real time and how much he would adjust with each new substitution, every time a player graduated or quit.
It was like chemistry to him, or alchemy, and it was still how Pep thought of the game, this alchemical mixture that required human bodies to make it work. And she made sure that whatever she did on the court turned to gold.
Pep had been mystified by her siblings’ lack of awareness of how the internet worked, how little they had searched for him online, but Pep was of a generation that had lived with the internet and with technology, and so she searched often for him.
She had been confident that he would turn up, that she would find some article from a newspaper in Minnesota about a new high school basketball coach named Chip Hill, but she never found it.
She would search “chip hill basketball girls,”
but it was a dead end.
Another thing he had left behind, and Pep had always convinced herself that it was on purpose, a sign to her and her alone, was his key to the high school gymnasium.
And Pep wore that key on a string around her neck at all times, would let herself into the gym at all hours of the day and night, shooting baskets sometimes until the sun came up and it made more sense just to sleep on the bleachers before classes started.
And then one day, when a new principal had come to the school in Pep’s sophomore year, he had noticed her one evening as he was leaving the school, and he told her that this was a liability issue and it wasn’t safe for her to be in the gym without supervision.
He said that she was technically trespassing and that trespassing was an infraction that could result in suspension.
He demanded the key, so Pep threw it across the hardwood, where it skittered to his feet, and when she went home that night, crying uncontrollably, which was so unlike her, her mom pulled her from the school and they rented a house in another town, and she had not even returned to Pocola for her books, which for all she knew were still in her locker.
The coach and principal at Howe agreed that she could have a key to the gym, could come whenever she wanted, because she was an All-State player as a sophomore and they had been losing to Pocola since her dad had taken over as coach.
And every single time they played her old school, even though she had nothing against her former teammates or her coach, she absolutely lit their asses on fire.
And she knew her dad would have approved.
And now, driving back to the hotel room, preparing for what came next, she thought back to her last game, that final shot.
She had been so angry with herself after the way she had collapsed in the first half, how terribly she had played once her teammate broke her ankle.
But she had locked in, partly because she knew that her brother and sister were in the crowd, watching her, and she wanted them to know how good she was, how fucking amazing she was at this game.
And she lit it up, turned into a killer.
And during the time-outs, when her coach was scrambling to adjust to the situation, as her teammates shouted encouragement, she wasn’t listening at all.
She was thinking about her dad.
He had always said, from the very beginning, that winning and losing did not matter in sports at all.
In so many ways, he had told his teams, the outcome is out of your hands.
Sometimes the other team is just too good and you’re going to lose.
Sometimes you get unlucky bounces; small, tiny reversals that change the entire trajectory of a single game or even a season.
And so you could be happy when you won and sad when you lost, but that ultimately would not matter.
All that mattered was that within the confines of that game, on the court, you did everything that you could and you played as well as possible, and you pushed yourself to excel and to get better and to thrive under the pressure. Because sports, he told them, was fleeting. There would come a time when it would go away, when you wouldn’t be able to play it any longer, not in the same way, with the same intensity. So you held on to it in the moment, put everything you had into playing alongside these people you loved, and you wanted to keep doing it after the game was over, that was what mattered. Every single game, he told them, every moment of your life, is just putting in the effort so that you can hold on to what you love for as long as you possibly can.
And he had left her.
And he had left Rube.
And he had left Mad.
And he had left this kid in Utah.
And what did that mean? Had he not loved it enough to hold on to it? She wanted to ask him.
She wanted to know the answer.
The game was almost over, one more free throw and then she would have one last chance to score.
And she would never know, would she? In that moment, in the scramble for the rebound, when she set her feet, got that pass, and scampered up the court for that final shot, had she held on to the ball just a split second too long on purpose? Had she hesitated, knowing she was absolutely going to drain this shot, because she wanted the game to be over, the tournament to be over, the season to be over, her career to be over, so that she could join her brother and sister in that car and track down their dad? She didn’t think so.
Her dad had said it all the time, how there are tiny factors that you can’t account for that will change the outcome of a single game.
And all you could do was know that you’d put in the effort to make it worthwhile.
And it had been.
Pep knew that much.
It was worthwhile.
1994, FORT SMITH, ARKANSAS, DIGITAL STANDARD-DEFINITION VIDEO
Opening shot of a sign attached to a white picket fence that reads: please keep off the gallows.
respect it as an instrument of justice.
The camera pans up to follow a set of stairs behind the fence before pulling back even more to reveal a huge white structure that, if it wasn’t referred to in the sign as the gallows, would look like a bandstand or stage.
The sound of wind constantly flickers in the background, but there is also a rhythmic, steady thumping sound.
There is a woman’s voice that suddenly exclaims, “Eighty-six executions in twenty-three years! That’s simply too many executions.
My god.
Arkansas.
What can you do?”
The camera spins 180 degrees to settle on a young girl wearing maroon track pants and black Air Jordan 8 sneakers.
She has a white long-sleeved Nike T-shirt that reads mr.
robinson says always use your elbows! She is bouncing a basketball on the dirt and the same woman’s voice says, “Pep, the ghosts of Fort Smith do not want to hear that racket.”
The girl rolls her eyes and practices her jump shot, letting the ball roll off her fingertips and arcing above her before falling back into her hands.
“I’m staying off the gallows,”
she tells her mother.
The next shot is inside a gymnasium, as the girl, who looks younger than the other players, calmly dribbles past her defender and then puts up a floating shoot that easily falls through the hoop.
She looks over to the camera and nods.
After a miss, she catches an outlet pass and, rather than dribbling in for a layup, stops at the three-point line and pauses for a second before putting up an awkward line-drive shot that passes through the net with such force that it makes a ripping sound, and the filmmaker can be heard shouting his approval.
The girl looks at the camera, nods, and then smiles, holding up three fingers.
After the game, as the people file out of the gymnasium into the parking lot, the setting sun has turned the sky a deep shade of pink.
The girl is carrying a trophy nearly the same size as her.
The camera follows the girl and her mother as the two of them hold on to each other, until the camera loses focus and the scene ends.