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But on this day, Ivan promised himself victory would be delivered. He held his breath, hearing Timmy's footsteps pass by ... Then stop ... Slowly, Ivan pushed up on his hands and peeked over the log. He watched Timmy, and the opening in the woods, measuring the distance in his head.

"See him?" Josh called out.

"Nah," Timmy yelled back, stripping bark off a fallen branch. "He's too chicken to show his ugly face."

Ivan inched up onto his knees, seeing Timmy take a step away from his direction. Then another. Ivan waited, setting his feet underneath his body, his hands holding on to the log for balance. His heartbeat throbbed in his throat. He might never get another chance like this. Ever. Timmy stepped again. Ivan's body recoiled.

Now!

Springing to his feet, Ivan broke toward the opening in the woods. He had a good jump—a great jump—and a clear path ahead. This time, he was sure, no one would catch him, and for a moment, he imagined himself pulling the sword from its resting place and hoisting it skyward.

But thoughts of neighborhood immortality vanished. On Ivan's left, Josh bolted from behind a thicket of trees. "There he is! There he is!"

Timmy was in pursuit, too. "You're dead meat, Korske."

Hurdling fallen branches and gangly roots, slaloming between trees and sidestepping rocks, Ivan ran as fast as he could.
You gotta get the sword! You gotta get it!

The opening to the backyard grew larger, but Ivan could see Josh coming quickly from the left, while, behind him, he heard Timmy's sneakers hitting the ground step for step with his own. "I'm gonna win!"

The words had hardly left his throat when Josh's shoulder slammed into his rib cage, knocking him off balance. Timmy grabbed Ivan's T-shirt by the collar, trying to drag him to the ground. Still, Ivan kept moving forward, churning his legs, tearing from Timmy's grasp.

Yes, victory would finally be his.

Glancing over his shoulder, Ivan saw both boys fall but not the branch where he was stepping. His right foot caught first, and as he tried to step with his left, that one caught, as well. He hit the ground hard, his hands protecting his face. But nothing stopped his right knee from skidding against the jagged face of a large rock.

"Oowww!" he shouted, rolling to his side. He looked down at his red, scraped-up knee, then at the two brothers just a few yards behind him. "Look what ya did to me!"

Timmy and Josh got to their feet. "You're down, Korske," Timmy said.

"You cheated," Ivan said.

The two boys stood over him. "No way," Josh said. "We got ya fair and square."

"Lemme alone. Ya busted up my knee."

Timmy bent down to inspect the injury. "Aw, it's not that bad."

"Is too."

"Is not."

"You're not a doctor," Ivan said.

Timmy turned to Josh and made a face. "Look at the little
baby.
We weren't playin' rough or nothin'."

"That's not playin'," Ivan said. Blood rose from the gash in his skin. "You were tryin' to tackle me hard."

"Were not."

Josh rubbed the dirt off his elbow and pulled a leaf from his shorts' pocket. "We were playin' by the rules. And the rules don't change for little babies."

Ivan, his lean arms bracing against the ground, lifted himself to his feet. His knee had stiffened and with even a slight bend of his leg, the raw skin burned. A trickle of blood made the top of his sock red. Tears were coming, and coming fast.

Don't let 'em see you cry. Don't! They'll tell Shelley; they'll tell everyone in the whole entire neighborhood. And school, too!

"I'm goin' in," Ivan said, limping ahead of the two boys as they followed behind.

"Baby," Timmy said. "Ya can't cry every time ya lose."

"I'm not cryin'!" Ivan stared down the two boys as they crossed his backyard to the driveway. He heard their sharp laughter, each snicker needling him worse than the pain from his skinned knee.
They're laughin' at me; they're laughin' at me.
He wanted so badly to pick up a rock and nail them—Timmy, especially—right in their foul mouths, then punch them in the gut. He wanted to do anything to shut them up. And the snickers kept coining.

"See ya later, girlie," Timmy said.

"Jerk," Ivan yelled back.

"Crybaby," Josh said.

"Jerks," Ivan yelled louder.

The back door swung open, the thin wood frame slapping against the house. Ivan's mother, slender, in her blue shorts and white blouse, said, "Ivan, we do not use that language in this house."

"I'm not inside, Mama."

"That is enough. Boys," she said, looking toward Timmy and Josh, "your mothers would not like all this carrying on, now would they?"

"But Mrs. Korske—"

"No
buts,
Timmy. You are the oldest here; you should know better," she said. "Besides, it is too beautiful a day to be yelling at each other."

Timmy hung his head. "Sorry, Mrs. Korske," he said. Ivan loved that about his mother;
everyone
listened to her.

"Run along now, boys. Ivan will be out again after dinner." She looked down at Ivan, sitting on the back stoop. "And no more yelling for you, too, young man."

"My knee, Mama," Ivan pleaded. "It's smashed." He had held out as much as he could, but the tears now flowed like the blood from his wound. Ivan limped up the stairs. His mother knelt down, catching him in her arms. "It hurts," he managed between sobs. "It hurts a lot."

"There, there," she said. Her warm voice had returned. "I'll take care of you."

Ivan sat on the countertop, his spindly legs dangling off, checking himself for other scrapes. His mother went to the pantry, then returned with the medicine chest and a clean cloth. She ran warm water over the cloth, rubbed in some soap, and gently washed the exposed skin. Ivan flinched.

"That hurt?" his mother asked.

"No."

She smiled and applied a generous amount of iodine.

"Looks like paint," Ivan said. "Orange paint."

"It will go away," she said.

Ivan heard the sound of crunching pebbles coming from the driveway as his father drove up in the family's new Chevy Nova, the maroon hood gleaming in the sun. He worried what his father might say, thinking he was some kind of weakling.

Soon, the car door shut. His mother was coming back from the pantry when the screen door opened and his father stepped into the kitchen. Ivan was sure his father could whip any other father in Lennings.

"What is the problem?" his father said, wiping his brow with his forearm.

"Nothing," his mother said. "Our son is a brave young man, playing with those bigger boys."

His father said nothing, walking over to the refrigerator and pulling out a pitcher of iced tea. He filled a tall glass and drank it down in one long gulp. He filled the glass again. "You hurt your knee?"

Ivan wanted to look like a man in his father's eyes. He sat up tall. "Me and Timmy and Josh were playing out back."

His father turned on the kitchen faucet, putting his hands under the running water for a few moments. Ivan noticed dried blood of a half-dozen cuts and scratches on his thick fingers, and he saw the strain etched on his father's face when he made a fist. His father finished the second glass of iced tea, then looked at Ivan again. "And?"

"I was hidin' real good. And I had this chance to win. So I ran real hard." His voice cracked. "But they cheated, Papa, they cheated and tackled me."

His mother tore open a large Band-Aid, carefully touching one end of the adhesive tape just outside the scrape, covering the wound with the gauze, then fixing the other end. "There," she said, with a kiss on his cheek.

Ivan pulled back. "I'm okay, Mama."

"Did you win?" his father said, drying his hands on a dish towel. "Did you beat these boys?"

Ivan hesitated. His shoulders slumped. "Not exactly."

"Why not?"

"I tried, I really did. Both of them tackled me, or else I coulda made it."

His father walked over to the kitchen counter, kissing Ivan's mother on the top of her head. Ivan saw her smile, and he liked that. "Our son is strong," she said.

His father's hands were immense next to his knee. His father said nothing, turning Ivan's leg slightly one way, then the other, then looking straight at him. "Did you cry?"

Ivan prayed he wouldn't notice the tears on his cheeks.

His mother stepped in. "He did not cry," she said. "My son does not cry."

"It looks like he did."

"You are mistaken."

His father again stared at Ivan. "Did you cry?"

"No," Ivan said.

"See," his mother said, wiping Ivan's face with the other end of the moist cloth. "I made some sausage and peppers. Enough of all this talk. Let us eat."

Ivan jumped off the countertop and stepped to the kitchen table. His father put a hand on his shoulder...

Ivan gathered the pages from the floor, arranging them neatly. He looked down at the application.
Let's get this over with.
He read the essay question out loud, "'If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would it be, and what would you discuss?'"

He had read the question silently a hundred times before, but hearing the words from his own mouth sparked something.
Living or dead.
He thought about it more. Did he dare write about his mother? Did he dare take the chance of spilling his emotions?

At the top of the first page, he wrote the date, then an inch below that his hand abruptly stopped. Sometimes he tried to shut out memories of his mother. He couldn't love her any more than he did right now, as he did yesterday, and the day before, and every other day of his life. And because he loved her so much, he couldn't keep the sadness at bay. Every day, every hour, every minute, held something that reminded him she was gone.

And what Ivan couldn't control confounded him. He could control any opponent. By ignoring them, he could control Holt and McClellan and the others on his team. But what Ivan couldn't control was the disease that had riddled his mother's body. And he couldn't control the relentless ache of having lost her.

"Who would you have dinner with?" he whispered.

Ivan again looked down at the pages before him. He remembered that day, long ago, when his mother bandaged the skinned knee he got playing out back with the Scott brothers, and he remembered a night, not long after, when he watched his parents kissing in the dark, their silhouetted bodies intertwined. The memories flowed easily, and suddenly he felt comforted. The pages would no longer stay blank.

Ivan picked up the pen, held it between his fingers, and let it move. Slowly, but with an unexpected confidence, he wrote:
I would have dinner with my mother, Anna Korske....

We gonna be together Saturday night?" Carmelina asked. "After I'm done with work?"

Bobby switched the telephone receiver from one ear to the other and propped another pillow under his head. It was dark outside, yet a tepid breeze blew through his bedroom window. Winter had given way to spring, if only for the day. Before practice, Bobby sat in the sun on the school patio, listening to the trickle of melting icicles. He was restless. Unsettled. All around him, it seemed, change was imminent.

"How 'bout we drive into the Village," he heard Carmelina say. "Ya know, walk around a bit, shop the stores, eat dinner. Well, I'll eat and you can watch, okay? Please, it's real important we talk ... Bobby, are ya listening?"

"I'm tired, Carmelina," he said. "I gotta get to sleep."

"You'll come over, then?"

"Maybe."

"What's 'maybe'?"

"We got a match Saturday. It's the last match of the season. I'm sure Kenny and the guys'll wanna do something after."

"Maybe I wanna do something with you," Carmelina said. "Ever think about that? We should be together, Bobby; that's what boyfriends and girlfriends do."

He drew in a breath, loud enough for her to hear. "Look, Carmelina, the districts are in two weeks. I gotta focus. That guy I wrestled on Wednesday was a region champ last year, and I beat him badly. It would've been nice if you'd been there."

"Bobby, ya know—"

"Yeah, yeah," he interrupted, "you have to work."

"Ya know I do."

"Yeah, well, who knows how far I can go if I keep Wrestling like this? Know how important that is to me?"

"Sure, I understand," Carmelina said, but it didn't sound like she did.

"Things'll change," Bobby said.

There was a hesitation. "When?"

"After the season."

There was a pause. "You're done with me," Carmelina said. "I can tell."

"That's not it."

"You're such a liar."

"I'm not lying," Bobby said. "I just feel like ... like something really important is gonna happen soon. It's hard to explain. Carmelina, I don't know, maybe we should—" Something had caught his attention. Bobby covered the receiver.

He heard music. Bobby sat up and looked out the window at the back walkway. He could tell a light was on in the family room. He looked at the clock. It was quarter to eleven, yet his father wasn't home. He listened more closely. It was that
same
music.

"We'll talk tomorrow night," Bobby said into the receiver. "I gotta go."

"Why?"

"I just gotta," Bobby said.

"Now?"

"It's late and I'm thirsty and hungry and tired."

"You wanna break up," Carmelina said. "I can hear it in your voice."

"Carmelina—"

"Don't be an asshole, Bobby. Don't do this over the phone. Promise we'll talk in person. Saturday night. It's important. We'll figure everything out."

"Yeah, sure," Bobby said, before hanging up.

He walked down the stairs to the living room, where a bay window overlooked the front lawn. In the dark, he moved quietly along the silk sofa, then past two glass tables upon which sat some of his mother's treasured crystal figurines. The music started again.

Bobby crouched down, recognizing the voice of Dionne Warwick on the stereo. He had heard the music before but had never paid any attention, never listened to the words, never wondered why his mother played the same songs over and over, late at night, when his father wasn't home.