The Whore's Child

bad thing to be, not if that’s what you were naturally. From where they were all sitting along the first baseline, center field looked a long way off, much farther from home plate than it was playing Wiffle ball in somebody’s backyard, and Lin wasn’t sure he could throw a baseball that far. He told Mr. Christie he supposed second base would be fine.
    â€œThat a new glove you got there, Linwood?” the coach asked, beaming at him.
    â€œDon’t worry, you’ll grow into it,” his father had said when Lin tried the glove on. They’d gone out for spaghetti at Rigazzi’s on Christmas Eve and this was where he’d opened his present. Try as he might, Lin couldn’t get the mitt to close.
    â€œIt’s a good one,” his father told him, as if that explained why. “So take care of it, and don’t leave it out in the rain.”
    â€œI won’t,” Lin promised.
    â€œOkay then,” his father said, apparently relieved to get these issues cleared up. After dinner, they drove back to the house where they’d all lived together until that fall, when his father moved into the apartment above the barbershop. When Lin started to get out, his father said to hold on a minute, and they waited there at the curb for several minutes. What they were waiting for, Lin supposed, flexing his new glove with both hands, was for his mother to notice the car and invite his father to join them for the rest of Christmas Eve. Being Catholic, they were separated, not divorced. His mother’s position was that his father could come back and live with them again as soon as he grew up, but not until. His father had predicted that his mother would kiss his ass before he’d ever walk through that door again. Both of these, Lin had concluded, were highly unlikely events.
    â€œWell,” his father said, staring at the house, “Merry Christmas then.”
    MATHEMATICAL PROBABILITY
    For the first week, Mr. Christie divided the team into three groups and held separate practices: the pitchers and catchers one day, the outfielders the next, then finally the infielders. Two or three boys idled around each base, awaiting their turn to field a grounder. With so many boys, it would’ve taken quite a while between turns, even if Mr. Christie hadn’t kept dropping the bat and pulling on his mitt to demonstrate the proper position to field a ground ball. Lin paid attention for as long as he could, but then allowed his thoughts to wander. What had been puzzling him for some time was mathematical probability as it applied to his coach. The problem was this: Mr. Christie was one of four ushers at the eleven o’clock Mass that Lin and his mother attended on Sunday. Each week she gave her son the envelope—Lin happened to know there were two dollar bills sealed inside—for him to deposit in the long-handled wicker basket, but how did it always happen to be Mr. Christie leaning into their pew? Always arriving just before the services began, Lin and his mother had to take seats wherever there was room. Although the church had four aisles, no matter where they ended up it was always Mr. Christie who accepted their offering, and he always gave Lin a wink as if to acknowledge a special bond between them.
    Before Lin could come to any conclusions about what this bond might be, he heard Mr. Christie call out, “Look alive out there, Linwood!” This hurt his feelings because it sounded like a criticism even before anything had actually been required of him. But once the ball leapt off Mr. Christie’s bat, he realized that it wasn’t a criticism but a warning. The baseball seemed to generate sound not only by thumping along the hard infield dirt but also by cutting through the air. There was time for just two quick thoughts. The first came in the form of a question: If Mr. Christie was so fond of him, why had he hit the ball so hard? The second arrived as a decision. True, it was clearly his name that had been called, but it seemed to Lin that he should feign confusion and pretend that he thought this ball rightfully belonged to the boy standing next to him. In the split second it took him to step aside, he very nearly convinced himself that this heartfelt wish was fact; there was also just enough time for the ball to find an infield divot, change direction and express, it seemed to Lin, its innermost desire, which was to belong to Linwood Hart and not the boy