Lucy spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the hard metal bleachers.  Squinting into the bright sunshine, ignoring the nagging ache in her lower back, and the even more painful ache in her heart; thinking instead, about all the metaphors she’d come up with over the years as part of her endless attempt to explain her feelings about baseball to Dan.  

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The man loved metaphors even more than he loved baseball, but even so, and despite all their years together, he just could not seem to appreciate the depths of her frustration with the sport.

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Baseball, as she’d often told him, was like a foreign language.  It was something she had absolutely no ear for, at all.  And although he and Seth—and her brother and cousin, as well—were all versed in the language, and had been speaking it to each other for years; not one of them could translate the simplest phrase into something she could understand.  

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What little she did know about baseball; she’d learned by default.  The result of having watched her son fall into baseball every Spring with the same regularity with which he fell asleep each night.  A sound, seamless, sleep from which he could not be shaken until morning.  Or, in this case, of course, October.

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It wasn’t that she didn’t want to understand the game.  She’d love to at least like the sport a little bit.  So that maybe sitting here, week after week, and year after year, would seem less like a series of prison terms she’d been sentenced to, and more like a present she’d been given.  A wonderful present.  A reward.  A special privilege that she alone had been granted.  

It ought to feel like a gift, she thought, as she watched her son play centerfield with the kind of concentration she could only wish he’d ever give to his schoolwork; and with a grace that left her absolutely breathless, shimmering with wonder and pride.  

Time and again, she watched him raise his glove above his head with lazy precision just seconds after the ball left the bat.  And too fast for her eyes to even track it, the ball would sail through the air to land in his glove, as though drawn there by a magnet.  

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There were times when she thought her son fielded with an effortless brilliance that bordered on precognizance—a belief she’d tried to share with Dan the previous year.

 

“Yeah.  He’s good,” he’d said, pride and amusement mingling on his face.  “I don’t know about brilliant, but—”

 

“What’re you talking about?” she demanded, “Look at him!  He’s way better than anyone else out there.”  She ignored the outraged expressions on the faces of the other team parents who’d been sitting close enough to hear their exchange.  What did they want her to do, lie about it?  Sometimes, the truth hurt.  She’d be jealous, too—if she were them.

 

Dan chuckled, “You think you might be just the littlest bit biased, babe?  You know, being as you’re his mother, and all?  Besides, I thought you didn’t know anything about the game?  Aren’t you the one who’s always saying how much you hate being here?”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d scoffed at the idea.  Biased?  Me?  Not a chance of it.  “Besides, if they’d actually win once in awhile, maybe watching them play would be a little less painful.  But there’s no fear of that happening.  I swear, that umpire should be taken out someplace and shot!”

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