* * *
Chapter 18: Dad
The field was behind the community center in the South End, and it was not much of a field, the grass worn to dirt around the bases, the outfield fence leaning like it was tired. But on Saturday mornings in May it filled with the particular noise of a dozen eight- and nine-year-olds, and Michael had learned, over the spring, that there was nowhere else he would rather be.
The firm had survived his Saturday absences. The world had not ended because he left at noon on a Friday, once, to watch a spelling bee. He had spent fifteen years believing his value was measured in billable hours, and it had taken a boy with a paper bag to show him the exchange rate.
His Saturdays used to belong to case files and the quiet apartment, to the particular silence of a man who had organized his life down to the drawer dividers. Now they belonged to this: a paper cup of coffee going cold in his hand, a folding chair with his name Sharpied on the back by a seven-year-old, and Lily beside him keeping score in a spiral notebook, in a private notation system no one else could read.
"That's a K," Lily announced, as the batter walked on four pitches. "K is for kind of out."
Claire sat a few feet down the fence line with a paperback open in her lap, recovered enough by spring to argue about Ethan's pitch count with anyone who would listen, which was no one, since no one was counting pitches in a parks-department league.
Ethan's first time up, he had worked a walk, fouling off two pitches with the grim focus of a much older player. Lily had recorded it in the scorebook as W. "W is for walked, obviously," she said. Claire had leaned forward on her folding chair like the walk was the bottom of the ninth.
Bottom of the fifth. Ethan on first. He was not the fastest kid on the team, but he was the most stubborn, and when the grounder skipped past the shortstop's glove he took off, arms pumping, his cap flying off behind him. The throw came in high and wild. Ethan slid.
He came up sitting in the dirt at second base, safe, and then he looked down at his knee, and Michael saw the exact moment the blood registered, the way the boy's face changed, and then Ethan opened his mouth and yelled across the whole field, clear as a bell:
"Dad!"
In eight months, Ethan had never called him anything but Michael.
Michael froze with the coffee halfway to his mouth.
Then he was moving, over the low fence, the first-aid kit out of his messenger bag before he remembered deciding to bring it. He had started carrying it in October and never stopped. Claire was already there, kneeling in the dirt, and Lily arrived at a dead sprint and skidded to a stop beside them.
The knee was a mess of dirt and blood and gravel, the skin scraped raw across the cap. Ethan's eyes were wet, but he was holding on.
"Okay," Michael said. "Okay, let me see." He cleaned it with an antiseptic wipe, and Ethan hissed through his teeth. "I know. Almost done."
Lily crouched beside them, the scorebook forgotten. "He said it," she said quietly, to no one in particular. Then, louder, with enormous satisfaction: "Finally. Do you know how long I've been waiting for a brother who says Dad?"
Ethan managed a watery laugh. "I meant—"
"I know what you meant," Michael said, and pressed the bandage on, and Ethan winced, and Michael said, "Can you run on it?"
Ethan stood, tested the knee, nodded. "I'm good."
He trotted back to second base, and the game went on, and Michael went back to the fence, and his coffee had gone completely cold, and he drank it anyway.
* * *
After the game they got pizza, the four of them crowded into a booth, Ethan with his knee stretched out along the bench and a second bandage Lily had applied herself, slightly crooked, for morale.
Claire raised her paper cup. "To second base," she said. "And to field medicine." Ethan touched his cup to hers with the gravity of a war hero, and Lily insisted on reading the full box score aloud, in which Ethan had hit for the cycle and also, somehow, pitched a no-hitter in the same game. "It's my scorebook," she said. "I can do what I want."
Halfway through his second slice, Ethan said without looking up, "Dad, can I have your crust?"
"Sure," Michael said, and handed it over, and kept reading the box score Lily had invented, in which Ethan had apparently hit for the cycle.
Nobody said anything. Nobody looked at anybody. The word sat at the table like it had always lived there, like it had been waiting in the booth since before they arrived.
On the drive home, Ethan said from the back seat, "Dad, can we take the long way?" and Michael took the long way, past the Common, past the fountain with the water going, and nobody remarked on anything at all.
That night, after Ethan was asleep with his bandaged knee propped on a pillow, Michael stood in the kitchen and listened to the apartment hum. He had waited forty-one years for a great many things, and eight months for one word he had not known he was waiting for, and it had come across a weedy baseball field on a Saturday, unplanned and unpracticed, the way the truest things always came.
In the morning, Ethan would call him Michael again, probably, when he was thinking about it. Michael found he did not mind. The word was in the house now. It knew the way in.
* * *
Chapter 19: Frank
The Mass Pike ran west out of Boston under a flat white August sky, and Ethan rode in the passenger seat with a library book open in his lap that he was not reading, watching the mile markers go by.