Cousin Albert

Basketball practice has just ended at the Odyssey High School gym when a middle school reporter walks across the court looking for the team's star player. Lucy Cunningham-Schultz writes for her school newspaper, and the player she has come to interview is Albert Schultz, her own cousin. Walker Henderson, the school janitor, points her toward the locker room and jumps to the wrong conclusion about why a young lady would be waiting for Albert, which gives everyone a laugh once Lucy explains that she is only after a story.

Getting that story turns out to be the hard part. Albert will talk about basketball and about his job stocking shelves at Jenkins Market, and that, he insists, is the whole of him. When Lucy takes him to Whit's End and presses him for his hopes and dreams, he jokes about playing forward for the Chicago Bulls and then the Los Angeles Lakers. John Whittaker offers the two of them something to eat and tells Albert the choices are all up on the menu board above the counter. Albert orders a hamburger and fries, which is not on the board at all, then checks the time and hurries off to work, leaving his cousin puzzled by how strangely he is behaving.

Lucy decides that if Albert will not talk about himself, she will ask other people. The next afternoon she visits Jenkins Market, where Mr. Jenkins tells her that Albert has worked for him eight months and is a hard worker, and gives her permission to photograph Albert in the stockroom. Weaving through the maze of boxes, Lucy overhears her cousin handing money to a boy named Tony in exchange for an envelope, with Tony raising his price to fifteen dollars and hinting that he could tell everyone what Odyssey's star player has been spending his money on. Lucy fears the worst. Albert promises her it is not drugs, and when she refuses to let it go, he shows her the envelope and admits the truth: he cannot read.

The homework in that envelope has been bought, a little at a time, all the way through high school - just enough to hold a C average and stay on the team. Albert explains that his family moved so often that he attended twenty different schools, and that he was never with one teacher long enough to learn. Basketball is the one thing he has ever been good at, and he is certain it will carry him to a diploma, then to college or straight to NBA tryouts, with nobody ever finding out. Lucy begs him to tell his mother or hers. He refuses.

So Lucy brings the problem to Mr. Whittaker, who explains that people who cannot read usually want to very much but are embarrassed, ashamed, or afraid. Talking alone will not reach Albert, Whit decides. He picks up the phone, and a plan of their own goes into motion. At the market, Mr. Jenkins hands Albert a shift's worth of generic canned goods with no pictures on the labels, only words, and Albert cannot finish the job. The next morning he takes his frustration out on the gym floor, where Mr. Henderson challenges him to a game of 21 and beats him soundly.

The janitor turns out to have tried out for the NBA more than once and to have fallen short, and at thirty-eight he would rather coach - except that a coach has to be able to read. Henderson admits the whole day has been a setup, tells Albert he may well be a great ballplayer, and reminds him that he lost anyway. Then he mentions a reading clinic at Odyssey Community Church that night at 8:30. Lucy and Whit are still waiting there at 8:42 when Albert walks in and discovers who his assigned teacher is: Mr. Henderson, who does not read as well as he wants to either and can teach the basics while they learn the rest together. Albert agrees, on one condition. He wants to be shown that fadeaway jumper.