The day started out beautifully for ten-year-old Jack Keller. First, Miss Roebuck, his fifth-grade teacher, was out sick, which meant he had a substitute teacher, which meant he didn't really have to do much work, which meant he could do some serious daydreaming about the Knicks, particularly Willis Reed, whom he pretty much worshiped. Second: Dom was taking him to a game that night, just the two of them, and there was nothing he liked more than going to a Knicks game with Dom. Ever since he'd been four years old, which was when they first met, man and boy had connected. There was just something about the crusty old man – he kept telling Jack he was only forty-four but Jack insisted on calling him "old man" – that made Jack feel safe and protected. He was never afraid of Dom's temper, which could be terrible, or put off by his curmudgeonly nature, which could drive almost everyone else crazy. People seemed to shrink back from Dom as if they were frightened of him, but Jack never understood what it was that frightened them. Dom was thin and wiry and he used to be a boxer, so he looked tough, but a lot of guys looked tough without scaring people. They couldn't possibly know about Dom. Not the thing that Jack knew, anyway. That was a secret. A big secret. If they knew, Jack thought, they'd really be frightened. But sometimes, especially when they were together in public, he thought that maybe Dom's secret was the kind of thing you didn't really have to know. Maybe it was the kind of thing you could understand simply by looking.

Then again, it could have been the old man's arm that made everyone uneasy; people never knew how to deal with stuff like that. Jack had never thought there was anything much to deal with. Dom was just Dom, arm and all, and when they were at the Garden, he would let Jack eat as many hot dogs as he wanted – his record was four – and drink Coke, which his mom hardly ever let him do.