Free If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson Page B

relaxed and smiling, his long legs propped up on an ottoman.
    Two couples sat on the couch smiling and looking like they had been there a while. Miah mumbled hellos to them, leaned forward to shake everyone’s hand the way he had done since he was three.
    “Oh, my lord, Norman, this child is beautiful,” one of the women said, an older plump woman with short locks. “Where’d you adopt him?”
    They laughed. Miah smiled but didn’t say anything. He knew he looked a lot like his dad but mostly like his mother. His dad was tall and brown with jet-black hair that had begun to recede and a wide opened smile.
    “How old are you? Twenty-five?” the woman teased.
    “Fifteen,” Miah said. He grinned. It always made him feel good when older women flirted with him.
    “Well, I can wait,” she said.
    “You better wait until I die,” the man sitting beside her said. “ ‘Cause no one is going nowhere until I do.”
    They laughed again.
    “Sit down, Miah,” his father said. “Get yourself a soda or something.”
    “Ahm—I have a lot of homework.”
    “Percy working you?”
    He nodded to his father. “They’re trying to. I think I have it under control.”
    “You eat anything yet?” Lois Ann asked. “I can make you something right fast.”
    “Thanks. I got a slice of pizza after practice. I’m okay.”
    “Well, you go get your work on then,” his father said. “I’ll be up later on to say good night.”
    “You still getting tucked in?” the heavy woman asked.
    Miah smiled but didn’t say anything. “It was nice meeting you all.”
    “See you when you’re twenty-five,” the woman said.
     
     
    Upstairs, alone in his room, Jeremiah lay back on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. I kissed her. I kissed Ellie. Elisha Sidney Eisen. He wanted to scream, to run to his window, throw it open and yell it to the world. Right there in Central Park with the sun coming through the leaves and everything around all right. Everything all right.
    Outside the sun was beginning to set. He wanted to tell somebody-not the way he and his homeboys talked, bragging about which girl they’d been with, giving all the details, lying mostly, and slapping each other five over it. No. Not like that. He wanted to sit with his head bent toward somebody, whispering-how strange and perfect it all was. How ... how precise and brilliant. Yeah, those were the words he’d use if someone was there. If someone was listening.
    Miah sighed and turned toward the window. He could hear his father and Lois Ann laughing with their friends. He could hear girls outside chanting, Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, one, ten, twenty, thirty,
    forty, two. And in the distance, he heard the vague sound of a basketball, someone bouncing it slowly, some young kid somewhere, learning how to handle the ball, how to keep it near him. How to keep control.
    He remembered those early days-the ball feeling big and unmanageable in his little hands. He remembered trying to dribble with two hands and the big boys saying, Nah, Little Miah — you got to handle it. You got to use one hand. Make the ball yours. Show it who’s the boss. And the first time he felt a leather ball leave his hands and sail into the basket—a leather ball his father had given him for his ninth birthday. How different it felt from the vinyl ones he had always known. Don’t use this playing ball in the park, his father had warned. But, of course, he had taken it to the park and played game after game there until the ball was ragged and dead.
    And he remembered being older, running along the sidewalk, feeling like he was flying, and the ball, a vinyl one again, right there beside him, flying beside him like they were connected by some invisible string.
    Last Sunday, he had helped Little Ray from down the block dribble, helped him wrap his tiny six-year-old hands around the ball, stood behind him as he lifted it toward the basket and missed. You gotta want it to go in, Little Ray, he’d said. You