Mel spent so many hours in that camping chair, the sun had bleached her hair to match the waves of wheat looming beyond the outfield fence. The heat of the plains could melt her chair’s plastic cupholder but it couldn’t stop her from spending another Sunday waiting for Nate’s turns at bat. It was her son’s first summer of travel ball and she was developing a theory on the difference between parents and player-parents: parents lounged lakeside with umbrella drinks while player-parents suffered sciatica from prolonged sitting and sipped Gatorade to avoid dehydration. But they did so with purpose. They were doing it for their kids, fueling their boys’ obsession with this game that moved at its own languid pace and spoke its own perplexing language. She had learned what it meant to turn two, to get under a can of corn, to charge hard on a Baltimore chop and throw it up the line to first. She was still trying to understand how Nate could feel more at home on this dirt diamond than he did in his actual house, a sentiment he shared with her just the week before. Maybe this was just Nate. She wanted to believe it was only his father and his grandfather and their own philosophies echoing through him.
As for her, their actual house sounded nice, especially nice when the temperature reached triple-digits, heat rippling the air above the metal bleachers behind home plate. Mostly on these Sundays in the dregs of summer she thought about air-conditioning, a long but quiet car ride back home. Lately, however, she’d been escaping to another memory: the spring season ending suddenly with a playoff loss, seeing Nate overwhelmed with grief for perhaps the first time. Her fifteen-year-old boy brought to his knees on the pitching mound, his tears falling and mixing with the artificial clay. In that moment, she felt the sudden urge to tell him something that might quell his sadness. Don’t worry, sweetheart, there are so many more games ahead, she wanted to say. Too many, she thought. Even while she baked in the sun, she felt a shiver knowing her son would experience so many of life’s highs and lows within white chalk foul lines. He was the most like himself there; away from the field he only waited to return to it.
In between innings, she gazed out toward the empty mound. Even after a week of no rain, the clay still looked damp with Nate’s tears. Maybe for her it always would. On the car ride home, she peered from the corner of her eye at her son sitting next to her in the passenger seat, half-asleep and half-obliterated by the sun. For the first time, she couldn’t see her little boy. Only the man he might become.