Cohen turns his car into the VFW parking lot later that afternoon, drives around to the back, and then follows the narrow road down the hill to the baseball field.
“C’mon!” Johnny shouts, dashing from the car.
Cohen smiles. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”
He follows Johnny, holding his father’s old baseball glove. He found it buried in the back of a closet, the leather stiff and cracking. It scratches his fingers when he puts it on, and he stops and stands there for a moment under that blue sky, flexing his hand, opening and closing the glove, trying to work the leather loose.
“I don’t know,” he says to Johnny, who is already thirty feet away and itching to throw the baseball clutched in his hand. “I don’t know. This glove is in rough shape.”
“No excuses, Uncle.” Johnny laughs and throws the ball, its red seams twisting like strands of DNA.
Cohen reaches up, and the feel of the ball nestling in the web of his glove is almost enough to bring up the tears. He laughs because he must do something, he must make some sound through the unexpected emotion.
“Nice throw, Johnny!” he shouts. He throws the ball back into his own glove a few times, trying to loosen the leather. The smacking sound of the ball, the sting on his palm and index finger, the scratching of the baseball’s seams on his throwing hand—all of it is a time machine. He raises the glove to his face, closes his eyes, and takes in a deep breath. It all brings his childhood racing back, those summer ball games, before everything fell apart.
“Uncle!” Johnny shouts. “C’mon!”
Cohen holds the ball again, the seams like small tracks against his fingers. As he throws it, he feels the old movement, the rotation, the release. The ball sails through the air and makes that satisfying smack in his nephew’s glove.
“Nice catch!” he shouts. “Nice one, Johnny. How does it feel to be a big brother?”
Johnny throws the ball back. “Great,” he says, and his voice sinks into reflection. “Do you think Mom’s going to be okay?”
Cohen pauses the game of catch, keeping the ball in his glove. “She’s going to be fine, Johnny. They’ve got her resting. She’ll be out of that place in no time.” He throws the ball back. “What?” he asks, pretending to be offended. “Don’t you like staying with your Uncle Cohen?”
Johnny laughs. “I’d live with you if I could,” he says.
“Whatever,” Cohen says, but a warmth fills his chest. “You’re a good kid. You know that?”
They throw the ball back and forth between them, back and forth. Cohen smiles at the simplicity of it, the repetition, the ease that it causes him to feel.
“Attaboy,” he says. “You’ve got quite an arm.”
The sun is bright in the sky above them, and the warm spring breeze sweeps through the farmers’ fields. A train whistle screams somewhere far off, so far away that it is almost unrecognizable.
For a moment Cohen envisions himself and Johnny throwing the ball back and forth, but he is looking down at them from a great height. The two of them, he and Johnny, are two small specks in the middle of the dusty infield, which is a small brown fleck in the middle of all that green expanse of country, and there’s nothing else left in the whole wide world to be afraid of, nothing to run from.
There are only the two of them, alive in the green and the brown.