Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,37

madder in my life. The whole time I was thinking All I’ve ever wanted is to play for the Mets. Please let him be here for me. Please.

Afterward the whole team sort of hung around longer than we usually do. The scout was talking to our coach. All of us pretended to talk to each other and looked at them peripherally. Then Coach Jaworski said Keller! and waved me over. I tried not to smile but I smiled very much. The rest of my team bore holes into my back.

His name was Gerard Kane. He was as tall as I was and redfaced and he had Popeye arms and he wore sunglasses on a rope around his neck and a Mets cap. He was like everyone’s father. He talked to me for a while that day and he came to several more of my games. At the end of the summer season he told me he was going to call me to set up a private workout with a pitcher and me. I wasn’t going to tell my mother but when I got home the news burst out of me before I could stop it. I had no one else to tell. She wasn’t as happy as she should have been. All she talks about is college. She does not understand that she is part of the reason I don’t want to go. She said, Well, I guess it doesn’t hurt to go practice. You can always make up your mind later.

But I’d already made up my mind.

It took longer than I thought it would for Gerard Kane to call. He waited all fall, in fact. I didn’t blame him—the Mets had a good season. He was probably busy.

Last week, finally, my phone rang. It was an unknown number. I answered quick as I could.

Hello, may I please speak to Kel Keller? asked a girl I didn’t know.

This is Kel, I said.

Hi, Kel, My name is Sarah, she said. I’m Gerard Kane’s assistant?

Oh, hi, I said. My heart began pounding.

—Do you remember Mr. Kane?

Yeah, I said.

He’s very sorry it’s taken him this long to get in touch with you, she said. But he’d love to set up a private practice with you whenever you’re available.

Sarah sounded pretty. She said a Saturday would be best, and what do my Saturdays look like? December 10th is the date we came up with. Three weeks away.

Since then I’ve been dreaming. My news has been following me around like a happy balloon. There is one thing I haven’t told my mother: that if I get drafted I’ll sign. She will not be happy when I tell her this. She wants me to go to college even though going to college will mean leaving her far behind. Which I cannot do. As I have said. She is holding on to some idea of what our lives will be. The idea that she had when she was working still, when I was a good scared boy who did whatever she told me to do. She always told me she had dropped out of college after one semester because she couldn’t afford it. It was, she said, her biggest regret in life. She tells me, Kel, you’ll be a doctor. Or some days, Kel, you’ll be a professor. As if being a doctor or a professor was the best thing she could think of to be. As if she didn’t know me at all, who I was and am. And in my head I thought to her, I’ll be a ballplayer if it kills me. I know that every boy wants to be a ballplayer but I wanted it, I want it, more than anybody. I always have. I dream about it. Drifting off to sleep it comes to me suddenly: a vision of crowds in stands.

So I have to tell her. She’ll cry. I have to tell her anyway.

Sometimes I feel like I’m trading my mother’s dream for my father’s. When I was younger I thought somehow that being good at baseball would bring my father to me. That what he could resist in a son he could not resist in a famous son. A famous baseball player. In photographs, his orange shirts told me this. His pennants and trophies.

Does he have other sons. That is the largest most frightening question that I have. Does he have other sons that he is raising to be tanned and white-headed, out in the Arizona desert, that he is