Breaking the Fall by Michael Cadnum Page B

interesting ethnically, with a grandfather who had come from Mexico, but whose ancestors had emigrated from Ireland. He was sort of Hispanic and sort of Anglo, and had his own way of smiling down at the ground as though a grown man should be ashamed in front of his students.
    His ballplayers almost never spoke to him directly. They liked him, in an unspoken way, but I think everyone was embarrassed for him because he wasn’t Peoples.
    I waited.
    â€œI can’t,” said Coach O’Brien. “Bolt is too good. Shows up every day. And we’ve got Chau on the bench.”
    â€œI don’t mind being a utility man,” I said, although I felt my bones turn to iron. A voice in me said: Never. I’ll never be third-string. I used to stop the ball with my eye socket, my teeth.
    Coach O’Brien exhaled through his nostrils, a sad, quiet laugh. Someone had reset the machine and it was firing faster and harder, and a bat was snapping the ball straight ahead every time.
    He laid a hand on my shoulder, and I knew that whatever he was saying, it wasn’t yes.

21
    I slept badly, and could console myself only with the thought that Tu would tell Sky and their father that I was swinging the bat again.
    My father’s chair had been removed from the breakfast table, and was far off, by a wall. He had left, as usual, very early, the groan of the garage door briefly waking me in the dark. His dishes had long since been put into the dishwasher, but there was a faint outline of toast crumbs on his placemat.
    â€œWas Boston okay?” I asked.
    â€œBoston,” she echoed, like the word was a bad joke. “I can’t remember.
    But her phone had been trilling, and her answering machine had a dozen calls on it whenever I happened to look. She was wearing a new bathrobe, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. It was dark purple, and made a light, airy noise when she moved.
    Maybe she was waiting for me to ask more questions, but I didn’t.
    I thought our conversation was over, and had stopped wishing that the news was on, when she said, “It was too much to expect you to be deaf and blind.” She said this looking out of the window over the sink.
    There was a cactus growing there, a green, spiky rock that just happened to be alive. It was not like either of my parents to have a plant. A gardener named Nolo came once a week to attack the hedge and mow the lawn, and when I was younger, I had thrilled at the chance to massacre some Bermuda hybrid with a Weed Whacker as Nolo took a cigarette break and looked on, chuckling.
    We had always lived in this house, as far back as I could remember. But that wasn’t true, I realized, sitting there shaping my toast into a modified jelly roll. There had been a long series of outside steps, sunny and made of crushed rock stuck together, slabs of glued-together gravel. This was all I could remember of another home, an apartment building. I had sat there, maybe three years old, as my mother ascended the steps, carrying groceries, the paper bag crackling, my mother laughing and nearly shrieking, a kind of jokey terror in her voice, because she thought my father was behind her, imitating a bear. He used to do that—pretend to be a big carnivore. But that had been a long time ago.
    Besides, in this memory my father hadn’t been chasing her after all, and she had stopped and looked back, waiting for him.
    â€œI’ve been stalling,” she said.
    I pushed my plate away, unable to eat my toast and jelly.
    â€œI’m not going to make it ugly for you and your father,” she said. “That’s how it is, I know that. You and your father.”
    I knew I was supposed to say something, but I shouldered silence toward her.
    She was looking at me, really looking.
    I looked back, and then my throat squeezed shut and I had to look away.
    She turned and batted at the sink with a dishtowel, snapped at crumbs the way guys do in a locker room, a