Two years after the afternoon of the towel, Jamal stood again in the open-plan living room of the suburban house. Late afternoon light. Hardwood. Gray sectional. Family photographs — including, still, the championship photo, returned to a middle place on the wall as if time had negotiated a reassignment of meaning. His camo duffel was not by the door. He wore civilian clothes. His dreadlocks were longer. His beard was the same. His hazel-green eyes had learned a tiredness that was not despair.
Angela came from the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel — a kitchen towel, blue-striped, ordinary. The symbolism did not escape him. He almost smiled.
"Dinner's almost ready," she said. Then, carefully: "Daryl's running late. He asked if that was all right. I said it was your call."
Jamal set his keys on the side table. He looked at the hallway where a white bath towel had once ended a version of his life. The hallway was just a hallway now: paint, floorboards, the faint pencil marks of childhood heights near the pantry.
"Tell him to come," Jamal said. "If he brings that store-bought cake again, I'm throwing it out. Rhea's recipe is better."
Angela's laugh broke open like weather clearing. "I'll tell him."
She texted. Jamal walked to the wall of photographs and studied his own younger face — seventeen, grinning, arm around Daryl, no knowledge of the future pressing its thumb into the frame. He did not remove the photo. He did not need to. The past was not a place he lived anymore. It was a place he visited with better shoes and clearer eyes.
Daryl arrived with a homemade pound cake and an apology already forming on his mouth. Jamal waved it off before it landed.
"Sit down," Jamal said. "Eat. We are not doing the sorry Olympics tonight. We are eating my mother's food and we are going to talk about the basketball game like people who used to know how."