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the Edward Mandel School in Forest Hills, Queens. At four-thirty, the elementary-school kids were long gone and the people who worked regular hours weren’t home yet, so they had the court to themselves.
    Because Casey arrived at Bloom’s around 6:00 a.m. most mornings to fire up the bagel and bread ovens, no one minded when he left at three or three-thirty. Unless, of course, there was a sudden frenzy of customers desperate for bagels. This happened quite often, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. The department would be gliding along for hours, never more than one or two people waiting behind those being served, and then abruptly it would be inundated by scores of crazed customers all screaming at once: “Garlic bagels! I must have garlic bagels!” and “I claim that last poppy seed!” and “I’ll take one pesto and one dill pickle and one cranberry and two blueberry—no, two cranberry and one blueberry—and three dill pickle, and skip the pesto, and slice them all, wouldja?” and “Back off, chazzer , I was here first!” When things got crazy, he ignored the clock and stayed behind the bagel counter, counting, slicing and keeping the chazzers from trampling one another.
    Casey had been working at Bloom’s long enough to know that chazzer meant pig. He’d picked up a few Yiddish words from Morty Sugarman, his partner in the bagel department, and a few other words from Susie. She didn’t lapse into Yiddish the way some of her relatives did. She was too many generations removed from steerage, he figured.
    Susie. What the hell was he going to do?
    One thing he wasn’t going to do, apparently, was make his best shot—a three-pointer from just to the left of the key. Usually the ball swooshed right through, all net, but today he’d bounced it off the rim twice and off the backboard once. Bad enough to keep missing like that. Worse to keep missing in front of a witness.
    Especially when that witness was Mose, who knew Casey’s moves on the court better than Casey himself did. They’d met as undergrads at St. John’s, when they’d both had the ludicrous idea of joining the university’s basketball team as walk-ons. They’d spent an afternoon strutting their stuff for an assistant coach, who had bluntly directed them to the intramural program. “No tryouts necessary,” he’d barked. “I think you’ll make a team.”
    “He thinks? ” Mose had whispered to Casey as they toweled off their sweat and headed for the gym door.
    Eight years later they were still playing, just because they loved the game. Every Tuesday evening during the months of daylight saving time, they played with a group of friends. And Friday afternoons, if Mose could leave work early, they tried to catch a couple of hours, just the two of them, playing one-on-one or Pony. Basketball was one of those things, like ice-cold ale, or a warm, chewy “everything” bagel with a thick schmear —another Yiddish word Casey had picked up from working at Bloom’s—or Jackie Chan movies or good sex, that a person could love without being able to pinpoint specifically what made it so lovable.
    Susie had once suggested that basketball was like ballet, and he’d nearly choked on the ice-cold ale he’d been enjoying. Basketball was like ballet the way a shell sirloin was like soy curd. Casey knew a thing or two about food; if pressed, he could incorporate soy curd into a recipe. And if his life depended on it, he could probably sit through a ballet. A short one.
    “The jumping,” Susie had tried to explain. “The way you move your arms. The grace. It’s very balletic.”
    If that was what she thought, maybe their breaking up wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
    Mose slipped past him for a layup, not terribly difficult since Casey’s feet were planted on the asphalt and his mind was lost in Susie-land. Not until Mose threw the ball at him, hard, did he drag his attention back to the court. “Wake up, Woody,” Mose snapped.
    “Shut up, Wesley,”