It was still light outside and Dad wasn’t home yet. Mom told us we needed to wait for dinner so all of us could eat together. I didn’t mind. Dad worked all day cleaning pools and if he was late, it meant I could spend more time outside playing basketball with my brother.
Dad played basketball in an old-fashioned way. He always used two hands to hold the ball and he was always careful to line up his body with the basket. Each of his shots is perfectly measured so that the ball drops cleanly through the hoop (篮框). A few years before, when there had been more money to spend, Dad had bought us a backboard and a hoop and had set up a tall metal pole on the side of the driveway. It was primitive, but still, we could imagine it as a basketball court.
We would play basketball all day if Mom let us. We practiced all sorts of shots and tried to sharpen our skills by cutting around each other, sending the ball through each other’s legs and passing it behind our backs. It felt like magic holding a ball, aiming at the basket, sending it into the air and waiting for it to drop into the basket—all the problems of the world seemed to fade away.
Lately Dad didn’t see magic anywhere. He’d lost more customers to job losses. Many of Dad’s customers who had lost their jobs told him they couldn’t afford to pay Dad to clean their pools anymore. I could tell Dad was worried each night.
I squeezed past my brother to put in another layup (带球上篮). That was when I heard Dad arriving home. “Hey, guys!” Dad said as he got out of the car. His shoulders slumped forward with tiredness. It was early and there was still a lot of light left in the sky. In the fading rays of the sun, the light revealed a lot more wrinkles on my Dad’s face than I remembered.
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I thought maybe I can cheer him up.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________It was almost too dark to see the ball and the dinner was ready.
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