What the Game Cost Us

By the time I put the pieces together, I knew Dad hadn’t been heading home after leaving Aunt Renee’s apartment. He’d taken the road south, driving toward Atlanta in the dark. The showcase wasn’t his destination.

He was after Trent Miller.

The eight hundred dollars Mom had asked Renee to lend us wasn’t the whole cost of the weekend. There was another number, one I’d seen on a bank statement I had no business reading.

I turned toward my aunt. The chill in my gut seemed to harden. “Aunt Renee, what do those premium recruiting packages cost?”

She frowned, caught off guard. “I couldn’t say. Maybe a thousand?”

“Five thousand,” I murmured. I’d read the figure and couldn’t get it out of my head. “Dad didn’t only pay to get into the showcase. He bought Miller’s package. He went to Atlanta to get the money back.”

“Five thousand dollars?” Renee said. Her voice came out strained and low. For a moment she stayed still, one hand beside her coffee cup on the counter.

“That’s the price of the premium deal,” I said. My chest tightened, like the room had lost its air. “Coach Wilson told me Miller’s a scammer. He takes people’s money and promises scouts who never show up. If Dad found out, he didn’t go to Atlanta to watch games. He went after Miller.”

Renee looked at me, working through what I’d said. Then she reached for the keys in the bowl by the door.

“Shoes. Now,” she said.

We made the drive to my house in twelve minutes. I called Dad the whole way. The phone rang until voicemail picked up; I ended the call and tried again. My thumb trembled against the glass.

From the street, our place could have belonged to a family with nothing wrong. The lawn was trimmed, and the morning sun shone on the porch. Nothing outside gave away what was happening inside.

Renee used her spare key instead of knocking. She opened the door and strode across the entryway, her shoes tapping against the wood.

Mom sat at the kitchen table in her beige cardigan. Her attention was fixed on a legal pad crowded with numbers and crossed-out calculations. Cartoon noises blared from the living room, where Jordan watched from the rug in his pajamas, unaware of how unsteady everything had become.

Mom raised her head. Her eyes were red, with tired, swollen skin underneath. Relief flickered across her face when she saw me, then vanished as she noticed Renee at my back.

“Where’s Marcus?” Renee asked. She didn’t stop to exchange greetings.

Mom got to her feet and covered the legal pad with one hand. “He never came home. He texted me at two, said he was near the hotel. I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Elena, Isaiah knows about Trent Miller,” Renee said, quiet and firm. “He knows about the five thousand dollars, too. I need to know how deep you are in this. Marcus is in Atlanta trying to claw the money back from a man who makes his living taking it.”

Mom recoiled. She looked from Renee to me, her lips parting without a sound. Then she checked that Jordan was still watching cartoons before she spoke more softly.

“You weren’t meant to find out,” she said. Her voice cracked.

I moved closer to the table. “Find out about what, Mom? That we’re out of money? I understood when Jordan put his camp flyer in the trash.”

Renee’s anger seemed to ebb as she took in Mom’s face. What remained was tired understanding. “Elena, how far behind are you?”

Mom hid her face in both hands. A sob caught in her throat and escaped.

“Your dad lost his job, Isaiah,” she said through her fingers.

The sentence settled over the kitchen, leaving no room to pretend I’d misunderstood.

“What?” I managed. The word hardly made it past my lips.

“In January,” Mom said. She lowered her hands, looking spent. “His division was cut. They gave him some severance, but it was gone by March. He kept it from you boys. He thought he’d land another management job before you noticed. But the job market’s awful. He kept looking, and nothing came through.”

Suddenly the last few months made a terrible kind of sense. I could see the connections, each one snapping into place.

The repairs we’d postponed. The credit cards stretched to their limits. The pressure on my basketball calendar that seemed to grow heavier every week.

Dad had insisted on opportunities that cost too much and shut down the local, cheaper options. I had thought he was a controlling sports parent, trying to live through what I could do on a court.

But he’d been scared. He was out of work, and the choices he had left seemed to be disappearing. He wanted me to get a college scholarship now, before the family lost the house and we had nowhere to go.