After dinner (Gina’s signature ravioli with her parents’ homemade gravy, a synonym for heaven) they sat out front, which, to Kieran’s way of thinking, could only mean breaking out a baseball and their gloves. Max had no time for baseball right then. Evil rocks were invading Mom’s flower bed and his Power Ranger action figures had to save the day.
Mallory threw the ball to Kieran, who invariably dove for it, no matter how soft the toss. It took 10 minutes of arguing that Jeter did, in fact, engage in a simple pre-game warm-up catch with teammates to get Kieran to abandon the role of human highlight film.
“Our next game is this Saturday,” Kieran said, furrowing eyebrows in his serious way, as he threw Dad some heat. “The game starts at 2 o’clock, but we have to be there at 12:30, you know, to warm up and stretch.”
Mallory caught the ball. His hand stung. “And have a simple catch like this.”
“Yeah, but sometimes? The coach? He throws us pop ups? Or grounders? So you can throw those to me, Dad.”
“I thought we were having a simple catch?”
“Okay, fine.” Chuckling, Mallory delivered, sending the ball 30 feet in the air. Kieran watched, adjusted his position, and caught it, delighted. He threw back a wild pop-up. Mallory leapt, barely snatching the ball.
Mallory lobbed it to his son. “You can just give me easy ones, okay?”
The ball made a familiar “pok” sound hitting the glove. The boy lobbed it to his father. “All right, Old Man.”
Pok. Pop-up. “Old Man? Nice.”
Pok. Kieran made a ‘C’mon!’ gesture. Lob.
Pok. Higher pop-up.
Big smile. Lob. “Grounder.”
Mallory sent one bouncing, a bit further right than he wanted it to go. “Monkey! Monkey,” he called out an old tee ball command meaning sidestep to the ball. Kieran did, scooping, spinning, then firing it back in a fluid motion that shocked Mallory. The kid had moves. The throw stung his palm, again.
“He’s out!” Kieran always had a game scenario playing in his head.
Gina appeared with an apple (peeled, cut into slices, all seeds and brown spots removed, as per Max’s strict requirements) and a photo envelope. “I made that appointment for the portrait. Sears. Wednesday, 5:30. That good for you?”
“I’ll make sure it is.”
She held up the envelope. “And I printed up the pictures from the Yankees Opening Day game.”
Kieran was at her side before his glove hit the ground. Mallory followed. Gina showed the pictures to Kieran, but didn’t let him handle them, knowing Mallory’s pet peeves all too well, one of which were messy or “out of order” pictures. When a few were done, she handed them to Mallory and continued showing the others to the kids.
“You look great there, sweetie,” she enthused over a shot of Kieran standing, Yankee hat over his heart, during the National Anthem.
“Good man,” Mallory rubbed the boy’s head. He took another batch from Gina, lingering on each before moving on. The fourth shot stopped him cold. It was of his father, The Bronx’s own Patrick Francis Mallory. Seeing the picture felt like someone had smashed Mallory’s chest with a sledgehammer. It wasn’t the image of Pop that Mallory held in his mind’s eye.
Pop was six foot, two; Mallory had only reached six foot even. The father had been a cop 28 years, most of it out of the Four-One in the South Bronx. Pop had never said a word about the dangers; he’d just gone down to the battleground each shift, serious, stern, determined.
The tired old man in the picture was not that heroic figure. Mallory stared at the simple portrait of a grandfather sitting flanked by grandsons at a Yankees game. The hair, which had been pitch black even last May when Pop turned 73, had suddenly gone gray. The sharp lines of his father’s face, at one time so intimidating, were gone now. They hadn’t softened so much as collapsed, splintering into crags, blunting the once handsome features. And the eyes, once sharp and all encompassing, were now clouded, distracted. The photo was both hard to look at and impossible to turn away from.
Gina watched quietly. Mallory spoke so only she would hear. “The arthritis was bad that day. Really bad. I even asked when I picked him up, did he still want to go, he was walking so slowly. You know what he said?”
“What?”
“He goes, ‘Frankie, I want to sit in The Stadium with my grandkids. Watch a game with them around me. Even if it takes me longer to get there, that’s what I wanna do.’ How could I argue?”
“You couldn’t. And he had a great time. Here he is laughing with his Maxie.”
She held up another photo. Max was dancing, holding Pop’s thick fingers. Mallory chuckled. “That was the end of the fifth, when the ground crew cleans the field and dances to ‘YMCA.’”
Gina let out that low chuckle Mallory loved so much. “Max’s favorite part.”
“Yeah, he doesn’t really care about the game yet.”
“Your father’s got Kieran for the plays, Max for the between innings stuff.”
“Yeah,” Mallory looked at the troubling picture again. “He’s not in pain this picture?”
“He was doing what he wanted to do, that’s important, hon. I like to believe he was just squinting, or concentrating on hearing Kieran’s opinions of the game. It’s getting harder for him to hear the kids.”
“Yeah,” Mallory took one set of the pictures, gave the rest back. He spent the next few moments staring off.
“Go.”
Mallory looked at her.
“Go ahead,” she nodded.
Mallory took the photos with him.