Chapter 8: Number Seventeen
The first game of Danny's Little League season fell on a Saturday in April.
Walter arrived forty minutes early.
He had a folding chair, a thermos of coffee, and a small paper bag from the sporting goods store that he set on the bleacher beside him and did not open yet.
Patrice arrived twenty minutes later, moving carefully but moving — the doctors had cleared her for light activity and she had interpreted that as generously as possible.
She sat down next to Walter and accepted the coffee he poured without being asked.
"He's been practicing in the backyard every night this week," she said.
"I know.
I've been watching from the car."
She looked at him.
"Walter."
"I park down the street.
I'm not strange about it." He paused.
"I'm a little strange about it."
She laughed.
It was the first time Walter had heard her laugh and it sounded like something coming back to life.
The teams came out onto the field.
Danny spotted them immediately from the dugout and raised his glove — the old brown glove, worn and re-stitched along one seam where Walter had taken it to a repair shop the week before, the label still legible inside: RYAN W.
— #17.
The coach had given Danny number seventeen.
Walter had not asked for it.
Danny had asked for it himself.
He stood at the plate in the bottom of the second inning, the glove tucked under his arm the way his father used to carry it — Walter had shown him a photograph — and he looked out at the pitcher with an expression of absolute calm.
The first pitch came in fast.
Danny swung.
The crack of the bat was clean and sharp and the ball went deep into left-center and Danny ran — really ran, head down, arms pumping — and he made it to second base standing up and turned around grinning at the bleachers with his whole face.
Walter was on his feet without knowing he had stood up.
Patrice grabbed his arm to steady herself because she had stood up too.
"That's his father's swing," Walter said.
His voice was not entirely reliable.
"That is exactly his father's swing."
After the game — Danny's team won, five to three — Walter opened the paper bag.
Inside was a new baseball, white and clean, and a permanent marker.
He waved Danny over and the boy came running, still flushed from the game, the old glove on his hand.
"What's that for?" Danny asked.
"For you to keep." Walter uncapped the marker and held it out.
"Sign it.
Your name and your number."
Danny took the marker with great seriousness.
He pressed the ball against his knee and wrote in careful, large letters: DANNY W.
— #17.
He held it up to inspect his work.
"Now it matches," he said.
Walter took the ball and looked at it for a moment.
DANNY W.
— #17, in a seven-year-old's careful handwriting, round and deliberate and permanent.
He put it in his jacket pocket, close to his chest.
"Yeah," he said.
"Now it matches."
Patrice put her arm through his as they walked to the car, Danny running ahead of them through the April grass, the old glove raised above his head like a trophy, like a flag, like something that had always belonged to him and had simply been waiting to find its way home.
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*Sometimes the most important things in a family are the ones nobody thought to protect — until a child did.*
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