Read Online Miracle on 49th Street by Mike Lupica - Free Book Online Page B

I’d call her my unofficial grandmother, but she’s not nice enough to be a grandmother.”
    â€œWhy do you keep her around?” Molly said.
    â€œBecause she’s indispensable,” he said.
    â€œFascinating,” Molly said.
    She couldn’t help herself.
    â€œMore sarcasm?”
    â€œYou bring it out of me.”
    â€œYour mother used to make everything my fault, too,” he said. “Why don’t you just give me the letter, before your fifteen minutes are up.”
    Molly didn’t care how crabby he sounded, she had at least made it from the game to his car to here.
    â€œThe kitchen’s that way, if you want something to drink,” he said.
    â€œI’m fine.”
    She sat down on the long sofa, which was so soft she was afraid she would disappear inside it. It was like she’d sat on some kind of cloud up at the top of the Ritz.
    Josh Cameron held out his hand, as if asking her to give back something she’d swiped. “The letter.”
    She stood up, walked over, and handed it to him. He handed her the remote for the television set. “Watch TV if you don’t want something to drink. Or check out the view. I’ll be back in a few.”
    He left her in the living room by herself, wondering how many other rooms there were in this place, wondering what Kimmy Evans would say if she knew where Molly was right now.
    She thought about calling Sam, but the only thing to tell him at this point was that she was sitting here in Josh Cameron’s living room. So she turned on the television, volume down way low, and found the New England Sports Network channel—NESN, as it was known in Boston—and watched the highlights of the Celtics game. For the second time tonight, she saw him doing all the amazing things he’d done to the 76ers. Some of them she felt as if she were watching for the first time, like she’d missed them the first time around, even though she’d been just twenty feet away.
    When the woman talking about Josh and the Celtics started showing highlights of other games, she thought about her mom’s letter.
    She knew what was in it. Knew practically by heart because she’d read it so many times.
    Her mom told more in that letter—or maybe just told it better—than she’d ever told Molly about Josh. She started from the time they first met in the bookstore at UConn. She’d asked what a jock was doing in a bookstore, and he’d told her, “I’m not like the other ones. I’m more than a jock.” And how she’d believed that for the longest time, until she began to figure out that he had settled for being a jock because that was the easiest way for him, that was the world he could control.
    She kept loving him anyway, even as she felt him slipping away from her, telling her the whole while that he loved her as much as she loved him. As much as he loved basketball.
    She finally decided that he would never love anything as much as he loved basketball. Or himself. Or at least the self, her mom wrote, that the world knew.
    There was a lot more to it than that.
    Later, she found out she was going to have a baby. She never considered telling him, because she could tell by then that a wife and a baby didn’t fit his plan—or his image—because his only plan involved the National Basketball Association.
    Her mom’s parents were both dead by then. She had been planning for junior year abroad, anyway, had given up on Josh Cameron asking her not to go. So she went. She went and took the money she had inherited from her own mom and dad and fell in love with London and never came home.
    Jen Parker said that she had planned to tell Molly the whole truth someday, when she was older. Maybe when Molly had become the college girl. But then Jen became sick. By that point Molly had actually figured some things out on her own, even though she didn’t know the real surprise until Jen told