Free What Hearts by Bruce Brooks

knew. First, Dave did not trust the state of solitude. He clearly did not think anything good could come of someone being by himself; Asa could not speculate about exactly which evils Dave believed arose from such isolation, but it was obvious that bad things were supposed to happen when you let a kid think too much, or play by himself, or read. Second, Dave did not trust Asa. Again Asa was unable to come up with ideas of what specific sins he was capable of committing up there—but he knew it wasn’t really a matter of specifics. Something about him made Dave suspicious.
    So he was never all that surprised when Dave came quietly up the stairs and popped into the room without knocking. Asa did keep his door closed. Dave always asked him why-implying that anyone who shut his door musthave something to hide—and Asa always replied that he liked being “snug.” This was true, Also, Asa liked listening to rhythm and blues at low volume on his radio and did not want the music to intrude on the television shows Dave and his mother watched downstairs. These reasons never seemed quite to mollify Dave, who looked suspiciously around the room from a step or two inside the doorway. Asa was usually reading, or drawing, or building a model car, so after his snap check Dave always withdrew without explaining the visit by so much as a feigned message.
    One Saturday morning in early October Asa was sitting on the floor in a dormer, reading Treasure Island beneath the window, when Dave opened the door and stepped in. Asa looked up. Something was different. Dave was wearing sneakers, thick-soled black high-tops. Asa had never seen them before. Even stranger, Dave was holding a football in his right hand.
    â€œIt’s sunny,” he said. He snuck a quick look around the room, but he seemed to be trying to keep his eye on Asa this time.
    â€œYes,” said Asa. He held up his book. “I’m reading by it,”
    Dave started to say something but stopped his mouth. Then, with an underhand snap of the wrist, he flicked the football across the room in a whirling spiral. Without thinking, Asa dropped Treasure Island and caught it.
    Dave grinned. “Good,” he said.
    Asa stared at the ball gripped unmoving in his hands. He was amazed: A second ago it had been whizzing two ways at once. “How did you make it go like that?” he said.
    â€œCome on out and I’ll teach you,” Dave said.
    So they went out and threw, the football to each other for almost three hours. During that time, Dave taught Asa quite a few very specific things—grip, arm motion, foot placement, the shifting of weight, the rotating of hips. How to plot a path for the throw to drop just where the running receiver would be. Dave did not instruct so much as show, perhaps—“Watch my wrist,” he would say, (instead of an analytical explanation)—but Asa knew how to learn things.
    He was thrilled by the whole day: the cool edge in the air, the dry detachment with which Dave offered simple expertise, the thin yellow of the light, and the passing itself, especially the eerie connection he felt between the hand that had just released the ball arcing into space and the hands that caught and carried it away on an unchecked run. But there was more going on than just the sport. After a half hour Asa realized quite clearly that for the first time he and Dave were giving free play to the natural tendencies that usually brought them into tight-lipped contention: Dave was being an authority, and Asa was being intelligent.
    During their first couple of years as fake father and fake son, Dave had tried to make Asa do many things—but he was terrible at it, like a bulldog sergeant major crushing the recruit in a bad army movie. As for Asa, he tried to make Dave respect his ability to think—but he was a bit of a show-off, snapping out uncanny perceptions about things he knew were supposed to be beyond his reach, racing