Chapter 18 - The First Baseball Game
The local Little League field was nothing like the pristine, manicured complexes Arthur used to manage back home. It was a dusty patch of dry grass bordered by wild blackberry bushes and rusted chain-link fences, run by a retired fisherman named Coach Higgins who wore a faded Mariners cap and smelled like saltwater and pine gum.
The boy stood nervously in the batter's box, gripping the wooden bat with both hands. His right hand still twinged slightly when he squeezed too hard, a phantom echo of the wooden drawer slamming down.
"Easy, kid! Keep your eye on the seams!" Coach Higgins yelled from the third-base line.
In the bleachers, sitting on the top wooden bench with a cup of iced lemonade, Sarah was laughing with a neighbor, her head thrown back in a sound the boy hadn't heard once during the entire five years on Maple Street.
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The pitcher wound up and hurled a fast, straight ball humming right down the middle of the plate.
Everything in the boy’s mind went quiet. The past dissolved. The kitchen floor vanished. There was only the white blur of the ball, the sharp crack of the ash wood, and the sudden, explosive roar of the crowd as the ball soared high over the left-field fence into the blackberry bushes.
