Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,35

I have told them he is dead. My freshman year I wrote an essay for my English teacher. The assignment was to write about a personal hero. My father died when I was four, it began, but I think I inherited many things from him. For one thing his height. For another thing his great love of sports. The first was a lie and the last was the truth.

I first noticed that I was good at baseball when I was very small, when our coaches still pitched to us. I could pitch too, really pitch. When my coach discovered this he told my mother and she told my grandfather and then from time to time he would practice with me when he saw me but he died when I was ten.

Baseball is the loneliest sport to play for someone who does not have a father. Everyone’s dad lines up behind the chain-link fence at games. Everyone’s dad has a catch with them in the backyard. Everyone’s dad tells them stories about great games and teams and players. Pounds them with phrases like Keep your eye on the ball. Swing through, swing through. Get in front of the ball, get in front of the ball, get in front of the goddamn ball. I was not given these by anyone but coaches. Still I made them my own. I would chant them all day. At night I would turn on the radio and listen to Charlie Rasco the sportscaster tell me about sports. This was how I fell asleep. He told me a lot of things I would not otherwise have known and I pretended it was my father telling me these things, I am embarrassed but it’s true. After school I would practice in the tiny dirt yard behind our house. I propped an old mattress against the back wall. My mother drew a red circle on it and a red dot inside the circle. I threw the ball at the mattress over and over again. When my mother was up for it I had her bat ground balls to me and I scooped them. This was rare. I did not want to be a pitcher but as a younger boy I was.

When I was twelve I was on an all-star team that went to the Little League World Series in central Pennsylvania. My mother took off work as soon as she found out we were going, which was especially hard because it was right before school started. Her car at the time was a horrible old Nissan that broke down when we were only half an hour away, and we almost didn’t make it. I remember her standing on the side of the road, going I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry, Kel. I was very mean to her and would not talk.

An old man in a baseball cap pulled over in a pickup truck and asked were we all right, and my mother told him no. My son’s on his way to the Little League World Series, she said. You better come with me, then, said the old man.

I could tell that my mother did not want to but she did it for me. She sat in the middle and I sat on the far side and the old man called a towing company and got my mother’s car towed for her. He was a very nice man and nothing to fear. He told us jokes on the way. Did you hear the Cubs got a new pitching machine? Yeah, it beat them five to one.

He asked me who my favorite player of all time was and I told him Mike Schmidt.

Attaboy, he said, because we were in Pennsylvania.

We got a phone call later from the garage. He’d paid for our car to be towed and fixed. My mother cried.

That was the best week of my life. We stayed in a terrible motel ten minutes from the nice hotel that everyone else stayed in. But twice I slept over in a friend’s room and my mother said it was fine and didn’t even seem sad or lonely. The nights I stayed with her we watched TV, huddled in bed, and got Chinese food from a place down the street. My mother laughed and made jokes and told me several stories about when she was a kid which usually she did not. One game I made a triple play all on my own. I caught a fly ball, tagged third