“No,” his father said. “You have fun.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I don’t think I could hit a single pitch.”
“Sure you could. You’re selling yourself short.”
“My best days are behind me,” his father said.
“Why don’t you take a few hacks? Come on, Dad. Just one coin.”
“Fine,” his father said. “But you can’t laugh at me when I look like a scarecrow in there.”
His father came into the cage and took the helmet from him. He took the bat, refused the batting glove. He was in a plaid, button-down shirt and jeans that fit him snugly, and Connell thought that he actually did look a little like a scarecrow. His glasses stuck out from the helmet like laboratory goggles. Connell stepped out of the cage and positioned himself where his father had been standing. His father dropped the coin in and took his place in the batter’s box, the lefty side, Connell’s side.
The first pitch slammed into the backstop. The next one did as well. His father had the bat on his shoulder. The next pitch came crashing in too.
“Aren’t you going to swing?”
“I’m getting the timing,” his father said.
The next pitch landed with a thud, and the following one went a little high and came at Connell. His father didn’t offer at any of them.
“You have to swing sometime,” Connell said. “Only three left.”
“I’m watching the ball into the glove,” he said. “I’m waiting for my pitch.”
“Two left.”
“Okay,” his father said.
“Dad. You can’t just stand there.”
The last pitch came and his father took a vicious cut at it. The ball shot off like cannon fire and the bat came around to rest on his father’s back in textbook form, Splendid Splinter form. The ball would have kept rising if it hadn’t been arrested by the distant net, which it sank into at an impressive depth.
“Wow!”
“Not bad,” his father said. “I think I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.”
Connell went in and took the helmet and bat from his father, who looked tired, as if he’d been swinging for half an hour. He dropped the coin in and found the spot in the batter’s box. His father’s hit must have freed his confidence up, because he made solid contact on all but one of his swings, and then he put another coin in and started attacking the ball, crushing line drives.
“Attaboy,” his father said.
He hit until he was tired, and they drove to the diner they liked to go to after the cages. Connell ordered a cheeseburger and his father ordered a tuna melt. They shared a chocolate shake. Connell drained his half and his father handed him his own to drink.
“That’s okay, Dad.”
“You drink it,” his father said.
The food came and his father didn’t really eat. Instead he seemed to be looking interestedly at Connell.
“What’s up?” Connell asked.
“I used to love to watch you eat. I still do, I guess.”
“Why?”
“When you were a baby, maybe two years old, you used to put a handful of food in your mouth and push it in with your palm. Like this.” His father put his hand up to his mouth to show him. ‘More meatballs!’ you used to say. Your face would be covered in sauce. ‘More meatballs.’ You had this determined expression, like nothing was more important in the world.” He was chuckling. “And you ate fast! And a lot. You used to ask for more. ‘All gone!’ you said. I used to love to watch you eat. I guess it was instinct. I knew you would survive if you ate. But part of it was just the pleasure you took in it. A grilled cheese sandwich cut into little squares. That was the whole world for you then. You getting it into your mouth was the only thing that mattered. You couldn’t eat it fast enough.”
His father was making him nervous watching him. He hadn’t eaten any of his sandwich.
“You going to sit there and watch me the whole time?”
“No, I’m eating.”
His father took a couple of bites. Connell called for more water and ketchup.
“I wish I could explain it to you,” his father said after a while.
“What?”
“What it’s like to have you. What it’s like to have a son.”
“You going to eat those fries?”
“They’re all yours,” his father said. Connell took some. “Eat as many as you like.” His father slid the plate toward him. “Eat up.”
She decided to scrap the intimate dinner they’d agreed upon for his fiftieth birthday and throw a full-scale surprise party instead. One thing it couldn’t fail to do was get him off the couch for a night, but she wanted more than that: she wanted to wake him up, set him on the course to recovering his lost enthusiasm. He’d spent so much time alone lately that it would be good for him to be forced to mix with others.
Until she was drawing up the list for the party, she’d never noticed how weighted toward her side their social group was. So many of the friends they’d lost touch with were Ed’s. When she considered her friends’ husbands, she saw the same thing—a withdrawal, a ceding of the social calendar to the wife. It was her responsibility to ensure that her husband didn’t get domesticated entirely. She would go beyond the usual crowd. She decided to track down some of the guys who were his regular buddies when they first got married and reach out to the cousins he never saw. She would remind him how much there was to look forward to.
She gave her garden box a full makeover, even though she knew the early-March chill would kill everything right after the party.
As she finished patting the soil down around a rosebush, a car zoomed past at a murderous clip bound for Northern Boulevard, salsa music pounding from its four-corner speakers. If she were a man she would have spat in disgust. She hated the driver; she hated the drug cartel he likely worked for; she hated worrying that people taking the train to the party might run into some kind of trouble. God forbid any of them got propositioned by the prostitutes that had begun to walk Roosevelt Avenue. One of them had approached Ed while Eileen and he were coming off the stairs holding hands.
She hoped that the NCB executives she’d invited wouldn’t judge her for her current situation. Her career depended on their seeing her as the kind of person who belonged in their midst. How could she ever explain to them the way Jackson Heights used to be?
She didn’t think of herself as racist. She was proud of her record of coming to the aid of black nurses who’d been unjustly targeted by superiors. She enjoyed an easy rapport with the security guards at NCB, most of whom were black.
She loved to tell the story of her father’s stepping forward to drive with Mr. Washington when no one else would. She also enjoyed recounting the tale of how, when none of the old Irish guard would shop at the Chinese grocer up the block, and the new store was on the verge of failure, her father had paid the man a visit to take his measure. Satisfied that the man, Mr. Liu, was a hard worker and an honest proprietor, her father had stood for a few evenings on the corner near the grocer with the suspect vegetables and stopped people and said, “Go spend some money at the chink son of a bitch’s place,” and they’d listened. Now the whole of Woodside was Chinese grocers. She wondered if the newer generation