Nine Inches

The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face

THE SUPERIOR WALLCOVERINGS WILDCATS WERE playing in the Little League championship game, and I wanted them to lose. I wanted the Town Pizza Ravens and their star pitcher, Lori Chang, to humiliate them, to run up the score and taunt them mercilessly from the first-base dugout. I know this isn’t an admirable thing for a grown man to admit — especially a grown man who has agreed to serve as home-plate umpire — but there are feelings you can’t hide from yourself, even if you’d just as soon chop off your hand as admit them to anyone else.

I had nothing against the Wildcat players. It was their coach I didn’t like, my next-door neighbor, Carl DiSalvo, the Kitchen Kabinet King of northern New Jersey. I stood behind the backstop, feeling huge and bloated in my cushiony chest protector, and watched him hit infield practice. A shamelessly vain man, Carl had ripped the sleeves off his sweatshirt, the better to display the rippling muscles he worked for like a dog down at Bally’s. I knew all about his rippling muscles. Our driveways were adjacent, and Carl always seemed to be returning from an exhilarating session at the gym just as I was trudging off to work in the morning, my head still foggy from another rotten night’s sleep.

“I’m getting pretty buff,” he would tell me, proudly rubbing his pecs or biceps. “Wish I’d been built like this when I was younger.”

Fuck you, I invariably thought, but I always said something polite like “Keep it up” or “I gotta start working out myself.”

Carl and I had known each other forever. In high school we played football together — I was a starter, a second-team all-county linebacker, while Carl barely dirtied his uniform — and hung out in the same athletic crowd. When he and Marie bought the Detmeyers’ house nine years ago, it had seemed like a lucky break for both of us, a chance to renew a friendship that had died of natural causes when we graduated and went our separate ways — me to college and into the management sector, Carl into his father’s remodeling business. I helped him with the move, and when we finished, we sat on my patio with our wives, drinking beer and laughing as the summer light faded and our kids played tag on the grass. We called each other “neighbor” and imagined barbecues and block parties stretching far into the future.

“Nice pickup, Trevor,” he called to his third baseman. “But let’s keep working on that throw, okay, pal?”

Go fuck yourself, I thought. Okay, pal?

“JACKIE boy.” Tim Tolbert, the first-base umpire and president of the Little League, pummeled my chest protector as though it were a punching bag. “Championship game.” He looked happier than a grown man has a right to be. “Very exciting.”

As usual, I wanted to grab him by the collar and ask what the hell he had to be so cheerful about. He was a baby-faced, prematurely bald man who sold satellite dishes all day, then came home to his wife, a scrawny exercise freak obsessed with her son’s peanut allergy. She’d made a big stink about it when the kid entered kindergarten, and now the school cafeteria wasn’t allowed to serve PB&J sandwiches anymore.

“Very exciting,” I agreed. “Two best teams in the league.”

“Not to mention the two best umps,” he said, giving me a brotherly squeeze on the shoulder.

This much I owed to Tim — he was the guy who convinced me to volunteer as an umpire. He must have known how isolated I was feeling, alone in my house, my wife and kids living with my mother-in-law, nothing to do at night but stare at the TV and stuff my face with sandwich cream cookies. I resisted at first, not wanting to give people a new opportunity to whisper about me, but he kept at it until I finally gave in.

And I loved it. Crouching behind the plate, peering through the bars of my mask, my whole being focused on the crucial, necessary difference between a ball and a strike, I felt clearheaded and almost serene, free of the bitterness and shame that were my constant companions during the rest of my life.

“Two best umps?” I glanced around in mock confusion. “Me and who else?”

An errant throw rolled against the backstop, and Carl jogged over to retrieve it. He grabbed the ball and straightened up, turning to Tim and me as if we’d asked for his opinion.

“Kids are wound tight,” he said. “I keep telling them it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, but I don’t think they believe me.”

Carl grinned, letting us know he didn’t believe it, either. Like me, he was in his midforties, but he was carrying it off with a little more panache than I was. He had thick gray hair that made for a striking contrast with his still-youthful body, and a gap between his front teeth that women supposedly found irresistible (at least that’s what Jeanie used to tell me). His thick gold necklace glinted in the sun, spelling his name to the world.

“You’re modeling the proper attitude,” Tim told him. “That’s all you can do.”

The previous fall, a guy named Joe Funkhauser, the father of one of our high school football players, got into an argument with an opposing player’s father in the parking lot after a bitterly contested game. Funkhauser beat the guy into a coma and was later charged with attempted murder. The Funkhauser Incident, as the papers called it, attracted a lot of unfavorable attention to our town and triggered a painful round of soul-searching among people concerned with youth sports. In response to the crisis, Tim had organized a workshop for Little League coaches and parents, trying to get them to focus on fun rather than competition, but it takes more than a two-hour seminar to change people’s attitudes about something as basic as the difference between winning and losing.

“I don’t blame your team for being spooked,” I said. “Not after what Lori did to them last time. Didn’t she set some kind of league record for strikeouts?”

Carl’s grin disappeared. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Jack. The strike zone’s down here. Not up here.” He illustrated his point by slicing imaginary lines across his stomach and throat.

“Right,” I said. “And it’s six points for a touchdown.”

“I don’t mean to be a jerk about it,” he continued, “but I thought you were making some questionable judgments.”

“Funny,” I said. “They’re only questionable when they don’t go your way.”

“Just watch the high strikes, that’s all I’m saying.”

Tim kept smiling stiffly throughout this exchange, as if it were all just friendly banter, but he seemed visibly relieved by the sight of Ray Santelli, the Ravens’ manager, returning from the snack bar with a hot dog in each hand.

“Just got outta work,” he said, by way of explanation. “Traffic was a bitch on the Parkway.”

Ray was a dumpy guy with an inexplicably beautiful Russian wife. A lot of people assumed she was mail order, despite Ray’s repeated claims that he’d met her at his cousin’s wedding. He ran a livery business with his brother and sometimes kept a white stretch limo parked in the driveway of his modest Cape Cod on Dunellen Street. The car was like the wife, a little too glamorous for its humble surroundings.

“It’s those damn toll plazas,” observed Tim. “They were supposed to be gone twenty years ago.”

Before anyone could chime in with the ritual agreement, our attention was diverted by the appearance of Mikey Fellner, wielding his video camera. A mildly retarded guy in his early twenties, Mikey was a familiar figure at local sporting events, graduations, carnivals, and political meetings. He videotaped everything and saved the tapes, which he labeled and shelved in chronological order in his parents’ garage. This was apparently part of the syndrome he had — it wasn’t Down’s but something more exotic, I forget the name — some compulsion to keep everything fanatically organized. He trained his camera on me, then got a few seconds of Santelli wiping mustard off his chin.

“You guys hear?” Carl asked. “Mikey says they’re gonna show the game on cable access next week.”

Mikey panned over to Tim, holding the camera just a couple of inches from his face. He wasn’t big on respecting other people’s boundaries, especially when he was working. Tim didn’t seem to mind, though.

“Championship game,” he said, giving a double thumbs-up to the viewing audience. “Very exciting.”

LITTLE LEAGUE is a big deal in our town. You could tell that just by looking at our stadium. We’ve got dugouts, a big electronic scoreboard, and a padded outfield fence covered with ads for local businesses, just like the pro teams (that’s how we paid for the scoreboard). We play the national anthem over a good sound system, nothing like the scratchy loudspeaker they used when I was a kid. The bleachers were packed for the championship game, and not just with the families of the players. It was a bona fide local event.

The Wildcats were up first, and Carl was right: his team had a bad case of the jitters. The leadoff hitter, Alex O’Malley, stepped up to the plate white-knuckled and expecting the worst, as if Lori Chang were Roger Clemens. He planted himself as far away from the plate as possible, stood like a statue for three called strikes, and seemed relieved to return to the bench. The second batter, Chris Rigato, swung blindly at three bad pitches, including a high and tight third strike that almost took his head off. His delayed evasive action, combined with the momentum of his premature swing, caused him to pirouette so violently that he lost his balance and ended up facedown in the dirt.

“Strike three,” I said, taking care to keep my voice flat and matter-of-fact. I wasn’t one of those show-off umps who said Stee-rike! and did a big song and dance behind the plate. “Batter’s out.”

The words were barely out of my mouth when Carl came bounding out of the third-base dugout. He had his arms spread wide, as if volunteering for a crucifixion.

“Goddammit, Jack! That was a beanball!”

I wasn’t fooled by his theatrics. By that point, just six pitches into the first inning, it was already clear that Lori Chang was operating at the top of her game, and you didn’t need Tim McCarver to tell you that Carl was trying to mess with her head. I should’ve just ordered him back to the dugout and called for play to resume, but there was just enough of a taste in my mouth from the earlier encounter that I took the bait. I removed my mask and took a few steps in his direction.

“Please watch your language, Coach. You know better than that.”

“She’s throwing at their heads!” Carl was yelling now, for the benefit of the spectators. “She’s gonna kill someone!”

“The batter swung,” I reminded him.

“He was trying to protect himself. You gotta warn her, Jack. That’s your job.”

“You do your job, Carl. I’ll take care of mine.”

I had just pulled my mask back over my head when Tim came jogging across the infield to back me up. We umpires made it a point to present a unified front whenever a dispute arose.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “Let’s play ball.”

He gave me one of those subtle headshakes, the kind you wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been standing six inches in front of you. “He’s right, Jack. You should talk to her.”

“You’re playing right into his hands.”

“Maybe so,” he admitted. “But this is the championship. Let’s keep it under control.”

He was forcing me into an awkward position. I didn’t want to be Carl’s puppet, but I also didn’t want to argue with Tim right there in the middle of the infield. As it was, I could feel my authority draining away by the second. Someone on the Ravens’ side yelled for us to stop yapping and get on with the game. A Wildcats fan suggested we’d been bought and paid for by Town Pizza.

“We gotta be careful here.” Tim gestured toward the Wildcats’ dugout, where Mikey had his video camera set up on a tripod. “This is gonna be on TV.”

LORI CHANG smiled quizzically as I approached the mound, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine why I was paying her a social visit in the middle of the game.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, sounding a little more worried than she looked.

Lori was one of only three girls playing in our Little League that season. I know it’s politically incorrect to say so, but the other two, Allie Reagan and Steph Murkowski, were tomboys — husky, tough-talking jockettes you could easily imagine playing college rugby and marching in Gay Pride parades later in their lives.

Lori Chang, on the other hand, didn’t even look like an athlete. She was petite, with a round, serious face and lustrous hair that she wore in a ponytail threaded through the back of her baseball cap. Unlike Allie and Steph, both of whom were fully developed in a chunky, none-too-feminine way, Lori had not yet reached puberty. She was lithe and curveless, her chest as flat as a boy’s beneath the stretchy fabric of her Ravens jersey. And yet — I hope it’s okay to talk like this, because it’s true — there was something undeniably sexual about her presence on the baseball field. She wore lipstick and nail polish, giggled frequently for no reason, and blushed when her teammates complimented her performance. She was always tugging down her jersey in the back, as if she suspected the shortstop and third baseman of paying a little too much attention to her ass. In short, she was completely adorable. If I’d been twelve, I would’ve had a hopeless crush on her.

Which is why it was always such a shock when she let loose with the high hard one. Unlike other pitchers her age, who struggled just to put the ball over the plate, Lori actually had a strategy, a potent combination of control, misdirection, patience, and outright intimidation. She tended to jam batters early in the count and occasionally brushed them back, though to my knowledge she’d never actually hit anyone. Midcount she often switched to changeups and breaking balls, working on the outside corner. Once she had the batter appropriately spooked and thoroughly off-balance, she liked to rear back and finish him off with a sizzler right down the pipe. These two-strike fastballs hopped and dived so unpredictably that it was easy to lose track of them. Some of the batters didn’t even realize the ball had crossed the plate until they heard the slap of leather against leather and turned in angry amazement to see a small but decisive puff of dust rising from the catcher’s mitt.

I had no idea where she’d learned to pitch like that. Lori was a newcomer to our town, one of those high-achieving Asian kids who’ve flocked here in the past decade (every year, it seems, the valedictorian of our high school has a Chinese or Korean or Indian last name). In just a few months, she’d established herself as an excellent student, a gifted violinist, and a powerhouse on the baseball diamond, despite the fact that she could usually be found waiting tables and filling napkin dispensers at Happy Wok #2, the restaurant her parents had opened on Grand Avenue.

“There’s nothing wrong,” I told her. “Just keep right on doing what you’re doing.”

Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You came all the way out here to tell me that?”

“It’s really not that far,” I said, raising my mask just high enough that she could see I was smiling.

BY THE end of the third inning, Lori had struck out eight of the first nine batters she’d faced. The only Wildcat to even make contact was Ricky DiSalvo, Carl’s youngest son and the league leader in home runs and RBIs, who got handcuffed by a fastball and dinged a feeble check-swing grounder to second.

Lori’s father, Happy Chang, was sitting by himself in the third-base bleachers, surrounded by Wildcats fans. Despite his nickname, Mr. Chang was a grim, unfriendly man who wore the same dirty beige windbreaker no matter how hot or cold it was and always seemed to need a shave. Unlike the other Asian fathers in our town — most of them were doctors, computer scientists, and businessmen who played golf and made small talk in perfect English — Happy Chang had a rough edge, a just-off-the-boat quality that reminded me of those guys you often saw milling around on Canal Street in the city, making disgusting noises and spitting on the sidewalk. I kept glancing at him as the game progressed, waiting for him to crack a smile or offer a word of encouragement, but he remained stone-faced, as if he wished he were back in his restaurant, keeping an eye on the lazy cooks, instead of watching his amazing daughter dominate the Wildcats in front of the whole town on a lovely summer evening.

Maybe it’s a Chinese thing, I thought. Maybe they don’t like to show emotion in public. Or maybe — I had no idea, but it didn’t keep me from speculating — he wished he had a son instead of a daughter (as far as I could tell, Lori was an only child). Like everybody else, I knew about the Chinese preference for boys over girls. One of my coworkers, a single woman in her late thirties, had recently traveled to Shanghai to adopt a baby girl abandoned by her parents. She said the orphanages were full of them.

But if Happy Chang didn’t love his daughter, how come he came to every game? For that matter, why did he let her play at all? My best guess — based on my own experience as a father — was that he simply didn’t know what to make of her. In China, girls didn’t play baseball. So what did it mean that Lori played the game as well or better than any American boy? Maybe he was divided in his mind between admiring her talent and seeing it as a kind of curse, a symbol of everything that separated him from his past. Maybe that was why he faithfully attended her games, but always sat scowling on the wrong side of the field, as if he were rooting for her opponents. Maybe his daughter was as unfathomable to him as my own son had been to me.

LIKE MOST men, I’d wanted a son who reminded me of myself as a kid, a boy who lived for sports, collected baseball cards, and hung pennants on his bedroom walls. I wanted a son who played tackle football down at the schoolyard with the other neighborhood kids and came home with ripped pants and skinned knees. I wanted a son I could take to the ballpark and play catch with in the backyard.

But Jason was an artistic, dreamy kid with long eyelashes and delicate features. He loved music and drew elaborate pictures of castles and clouds and fairy princesses. He enjoyed playing with his sisters’ dolls and exhibited what I thought was an unhealthy interest in my wife’s jewelry and high heels. When he was seven years old, he insisted on going out trick-or-treating dressed as Pocahontas. Everywhere he went, people kept telling him how beautiful he was, and it was impossible not to see how happy this made him.

Jeanie did her best to convince me that it wasn’t a problem; she cut out magazine articles that said he was simply engaged in harmless “gender play” and recommended that we let him follow his heart and find his own way in the world. She scolded me for using words like sissy and wimp, and for trying to enforce supposedly outdated standards of masculinity. I tried to get with the program, but it was hard. I was embarrassed to be seen in public with my own son, as if he somehow made me less of a man.

It didn’t help that Carl had three normal boys living right next door. They were always in the backyard kicking a soccer ball, tossing a football, or beating the crap out of one another. Sometimes they included my son in their games, but it wasn’t much fun for any of them.

Jason didn’t want to play Little League, but I made him. I thought putting on a uniform might transform him into the kind of kid I would recognize as my own. Despite the evidence in front of my face, I refused to believe you could be an American boy and not love baseball, not want to impress your father with your athletic prowess.

It’s easy to say you should let a kid follow his heart. But what if his heart takes him places you don’t want to go? What if your ten-year-old son wants to take tap-dancing lessons in a class full of girls? What if he’s good at it? What if he tells you when he’s fourteen that he’s made it onto the chorus of Guys and Dolls and expects you to be happy about this? What if when he’s fifteen he tells you he’s joined the Gay and Lesbian Alliance at his progressive suburban high school? What if this same progressive school allows boys to go to the prom with other boys, and girls to go with girls? Are you supposed to say, Okay, fine, go to the prom with Gerald, just don’t stay out too late?

I only hit him that once. He said something that shocked me and I slapped him across the face. He was the one who threw the first punch, a feeble right cross that landed on the side of my head. Later, when I had time to think about it, I was proud of him for fighting back. But at the time, it just made me crazy. I couldn’t believe the little faggot had hit me. The punch I threw in return is the one thing in my life I’ll regret forever. I broke his nose, and Jeanie called the cops. I was taken from my house in handcuffs, the cries of my wife and children echoing in my ears. As I ducked into the patrol car, I looked up and saw Carl watching me from his front stoop, shaking his head and trying to comfort Marie, who for some reason was sobbing audibly in the darkness, as if it were her own child whose face I’d bloodied in a moment of thoughtless rage.

LORI CHANG kept her perfect game going all the way into the top of the fifth, when Pete Gonzalez, the Wildcats’ all-star shortstop, ripped a two-out single to center. A raucous cheer erupted from the third-base dugout and bleachers, both of which had lapsed into a funereal silence over the past couple of innings. It was an electrifying sound, a collective whoop of relief, celebration, and resurgent hope.

On a psychological level, that one hit changed everything. It was as if the whole ballpark suddenly woke up to two important facts: (1) Lori Chang was not, in fact, invincible; and (2) the Wildcats could actually still win. The score was only 1–0 in favor of the Ravens, a margin that had seemed insurmountable a moment ago but that suddenly looked a whole lot slimmer now that the tying run was standing on first with a lopsided grin on his face, shifting his weight from leg to leg like he needed to go to the bathroom.

The only person who didn’t seem to notice that the calculus of the game had changed was Lori Chang herself. She stood on the mound with her usual poker face, an expression that suggested profound boredom more than it did killer concentration, and waited for Trevor Mancini to make the sign of the cross and knock imaginary mud off his cleats. Once he got himself settled, she nodded to the catcher and began her windup, bringing her arms overhead and lowering them with the painstaking deliberation of a Tai Chi master. Then she kicked high and whipped a fastball right at Trevor, a guided missile that thudded into his leg with a muffled whump, the sound of a broomstick smacking a rug.

“Aaah, shit!” Trevor flipped his bat in the air and began hopping around on one foot, rubbing frantically at his leg. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

I stepped out from behind the catcher and asked if he was okay. Trevor gritted his teeth and performed what appeared to be an involuntary bow. When he straightened up, he looked more embarrassed than hurt.

“Stings,” he explained.

I told him to take his base and he hobbled off, still massaging the sore spot. A chorus of boos had risen from the third-base side, and I wasn’t surprised to see that Carl was already out of the dugout, walking toward me with what could only be described as an amused expression.

“Well?” he said. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“The batter was hit by a pitch. It’s part of the game.”

“Are you kidding me? She threw right at him.”

Right on schedule, Tim came trotting over to join us, followed immediately by Ray Santelli, who approached with his distinctive potbellied swagger, radiating an odd confidence that made you forget that he was just a middle-aged chauffeur with a combover.

“What’s up?” he inquired. “Somebody got a problem?”

“Yeah, me,” Carl told him. “I got a problem with your sweet little pitcher throwing beanballs at my players.”

“That was no beanball,” I pointed out. “It hit him in the leg.”

“So that’s okay?” Carl was one of those guys who smiled when he was pissed off. “It’s okay to hit my players in the leg?”

“She didn’t do it on purpose,” Santelli assured him. “Lori wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t know,” Tim piped in. “It looked pretty deliberate from where I was standing.”

“How would you know?” Santelli demanded, an uncharacteristic edge creeping into his voice. “Are you some kind of mind reader?”

“I’m just telling you what it looked like,” Tim replied.

“Big deal,” Santelli replied. “That’s just your subjective opinion.”

“I’m an umpire,” Tim reminded him. “My subjective opinion is all I have.”

“Really?” Santelli scratched his forehead, feigning confusion. “I thought you guys were supposed to be objective. When did they change the job description?”

“All right,” said Tim. “Whatever. It’s my objective opinion, okay?”

“Look,” I said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

“I sure as hell hope not,” Carl shot back. “Or else we’re in big trouble.”

Sensing an opportunity, Santelli cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “Hey, Lori, did you hit that kid on purpose?”

Lori seemed shocked by the question. Her mouth dropped open and she shook her head back and forth, as if nothing could have been further from the truth.

“It slipped,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“See?” Santelli turned back to Tim with an air of vindication. “It was an accident.”

“Jack?” Carl’s expression was a mixture of astonishment and disgust. “You really gonna let this slide?”

I glanced at Tim for moral support, but his face was blank, pointedly devoid of sympathy. I wished I could have thought of something more decisive to do than shrug.

“What do you want from me?” There was a pleading note in my voice that was unbecoming in an umpire. “She said it slipped.”

“Now, wait a minute — ” Tim began, but Carl didn’t let him finish.

“Fine,” he said. “The hell with it. If that’s the way it’s gonna be, that’s the way it’s gonna be. Let’s play ball.”

Carl stormed off, leaving the three of us standing by the plate, staring at his back as he descended into the dugout.

“You can’t know what’s in another person’s heart.” Santelli shook his head, as if saddened by this observation. “You just can’t.”

“Why don’t you shut up?” Tim told him.

Lori quickly regained her composure when play resumed. With runners on first and second, she calmly and methodically struck out Antoine Frye to retire the side. On her way to the dugout she stopped and apologized to Trevor Mancini, resting her hand tenderly on his shoulder. It was a classy move. Trevor blushed and told her to forget about it.

RICKY DISALVO was on the mound for the Wildcats, and though he had nowhere near Lori’s talent, he was pitching a solid and effective game. A sidearmer plagued by control problems and a lack of emotional maturity — I had once seen him burst into tears after walking five straight batters — Ricky had wisely decided that night to make his opponents hit the ball. All game long he’d dropped one fat pitch after another right over the meatiest part of the plate.

The Ravens, a mediocre hitting team on the best of days, had eked out a lucky run in the second on a single, a stolen base, an overthrow, and an easy fly ball to right field that had popped out of Mark Diedrich’s glove, but they’d been shut out ever since. Ricky’s confidence had grown with each successive inning, and he was throwing harder and more skillfully than he had all game by the time Lori Chang stepped up to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the fifth.

I guess I should have seen what was coming. When I watched the game on cable access a week later, it seemed painfully clear in retrospect, almost inevitable. But at the time, I didn’t sense any danger. We’d had some unpleasantness, but it had passed when Lori apologized to Trevor. The game had moved forward, slipping past the trouble as easily as water flowing around a rock. I did notice that Lori Chang looked a little nervous in the batter’s box, but that was nothing unusual. As bold and powerful as she was on the mound, Lori was a surprisingly timid hitter. She tucked herself into an extreme crouch, shrinking the strike zone down to a few inches, and tried to wait out a walk. She rarely swung and was widely, and fairly, considered to be an easy out.

For some reason, though, Ricky seemed oddly tentative with his first couple of pitches. Ball one kicked up dirt ten feet from the plate. Ball two was a mile outside.

“Come on,” Carl called impatiently from the dugout. “Just do it.”

Lori tapped the fat end of her bat on the plate. I checked my clicker and squatted into position. Ricky glanced at his father and started into his herky-jerky windup.

On TV, it all looks so fast and clean — Lori gets beaned and she goes down. But on the field it was slow and jumbled, my brain lagging a beat behind the action. Before I can process the fact that the ball’s rocketing toward her head, Lori’s already said, “Ooof!” Her helmet’s in the air before I register the sickening crack of impact, and by then she’s already crumpled on the ground. On TV it looks as though I move quickly, rolling her onto her back and coming in close to check her breathing, but in my memory it’s as if I’m paralyzed, as if the world has stopped and all I can do is stare at the bareheaded girl lying motionless at my feet.

Then the quiet bursts into commotion. Tim’s right beside me, shouting, “Is she okay? Is she okay?” Ricky’s moving toward us from the mound, his glove pressed to his mouth, his eyes stricken with terror and remorse.

“Did I hurt her?” he asks. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“I think you killed her,” I tell him, because as far as I can tell, Lori’s not breathing. Ricky stumbles backward, as if someone’s pushed him. He turns in the direction of his father, who’s just stepped out of the dugout.

“You shouldn’t have made me do that!” Ricky yells.

“Oh my God,” says Carl. He looks pale and panicky.

At that same moment, Happy Chang’s scaling the third-base fence and sprinting across the infield to check on his daughter’s condition. At least that’s what I think he’s doing, right up to the moment when he veers suddenly toward Carl, emitting a cry of guttural rage, and tackles him savagely to the ground.

Happy Chang is a small man, no bigger than some of our Little Leaguers, and Carl is tall and bulked up from years of religious weight lifting, but it’s no contest. Within seconds, Happy Chang’s straddling Carl’s chest and punching him repeatedly in the face, all the while shouting what must be very angry things in Chinese. Carl doesn’t even try to defend himself, not even when Happy Chang reaches for his throat.

Luckily for Carl, two of our local policemen — Officers Freylinghausen and Hughes, oddly enough the same two who’d arrested me for domestic battery — are present at the game, and before Happy Chang can finish throttling Carl, they’ve rushed onto the field and broken up the fight. They take Happy Chang into custody with a surprising amount of force — with me they were oddly polite — Freylinghausen grinding his face into the dirt while Hughes slaps on the cuffs. I’m so engrossed in the spectacle that I don’t even realize that Lori’s regained consciousness until I hear her voice.

“Daddy?” she says quietly, and for a second I think she’s talking to me.

MY WHOLE life fell apart after I broke my son’s nose. By the time I got out on bail the next morning, Jeanie had already taken the kids to her mother’s house and slapped me with a restraining order. The day after that she started divorce proceedings.

In the year that had passed since then, nothing much had changed. I had tried apologizing in a thousand different ways, but it didn’t seem to matter. As far as Jeanie was concerned, I’d crossed some unforgivable line and was beyond redemption.

I accepted the loss of my wife as fair punishment for what I’d done, but it was harder to accept the loss of my kids. I had some visiting rights, but they were severely restricted. Basically, I took my daughters — they were eleven and thirteen — to the movies or the mall every other Saturday, then to a restaurant, and then back to their grandmother’s. They weren’t allowed to stay overnight with me. It killed me to walk past their empty rooms at night, to not find them asleep and safe, and to be fairly sure I never would.

Once in a while Jason joined us on our Saturday excursions, but usually he was too busy with his plays. He had just finished his junior year in high school, capping it off with a starring role in the spring musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. People kept telling me how great he was, and I kept agreeing, embarrassed to confess that I hadn’t seen the show. My son had asked me not to come and I’d respected his wishes.

A year on my own had given me a lot of time to think, to come to terms with what had happened, and to accept my own responsibility for it. It also gave me a lot of time to stew in my anger, to indulge the conviction that I was a victim, too, every bit as much as my wife and son. I wrote Jeanie and my kids a lot of letters trying to outline my complicated position on these matters, but no one ever responded. It was like my side of the story had disappeared into some kind of void.

That’s why I wanted so badly for my family to watch the championship game on cable access. I had e-mailed them all separately, telling them when it would be broadcast, and asking them to please tune in. I called them the day it aired and left a message reminding them to stick it out all the way to the end.

What I wanted them to see was the top of the sixth and final inning, the amazing sequence of events that took place immediately following the beanball fiasco, after both Carl and Ricky DiSalvo had been ejected from the game, and Happy Chang had been hauled off to the police station.

Despite the fact that she’d been knocked unconscious just a few minutes earlier, Lori was back on the mound for the Ravens. She insisted that she felt fine and didn’t seem confused or otherwise impaired. She started out strong, striking out Jeb Partridge and retiring Hiro Tamanaki on an easy infield fly. But then something changed. Maybe the blow to the head had affected her more that she’d let on, or maybe she’d been traumatized by her father’s arrest. Whatever the reason, she fell apart. With only one out remaining in the game, she walked three straight batters to load the bases.

I’d always admired Lori’s regal detachment, her ability to remain calm and focused no matter what was going on, but now she just looked scared. She cast a desperate glance at the first-base dugout, silently pleading with her coach to take her out of the game, but Santelli ignored her. No matter how badly she was pitching, she was still his ace. And besides, the next batter was Mark Diedrich, the Wildcats’ pudgy right fielder, one of the weakest hitters in the league.

“Just settle down,” Santelli told her. “Strike this guy out and we can all go home.”

Lori nodded skeptically and got herself set on the mound. Mark Diedrich greeted me with a polite nod as he stepped into the batter’s box. He was a nice kid, a former preschool classmate of my youngest daughter.

“I wish I was home in bed,” he told me.

The first pitch was low. Then came a strike, the liveliest breaking ball Lori had thrown all inning, but it was followed by two outside fastballs (Ricky’s beanball had obviously done the trick; Lori wasn’t throwing anywhere near the inside corner). The next pitch, low and away, should have been ball four, but inexplicably, Mark lunged for it, barely nicking it foul.

“Oh, Jesus,” he whimpered. “Why did I do that?”

So there we were. Full count, bases loaded, two out. Championship game. A score of 1–0. The whole season narrowing down to a single pitch. If the circumstances had been a little different, it would have been a beautiful moment, an umpire’s dream.

But for me, the game barely existed. All I could think of just then was the smile on Happy Chang’s dirty face as the cops led him off the field. I was kneeling on the ground trying to comfort Lori when Happy turned in our direction and said something low and gentle in Chinese, maybe asking if she was all right or telling her not to worry. Lori said something back, maybe that she was fine or that she loved him.

“Easy now,” Santelli called from the dugout. “Right down the middle.”

Lori tugged her shirt down in back and squinted at the catcher. Mark Diedrich’s face was beet red, as if something terribly embarrassing had already happened.

“Please, God,” I heard him mutter as Lori began her windup.

I should have been watching the ball, but instead I was thinking about Happy Chang and everything he must have been going through at the police station, the fingerprinting, the mug shot, the tiny holding cell. But mainly it was the look on his face that haunted me, the proud and defiant smile of a man at peace with what he’d done and willing to accept the consequences.

The ball smacked into the catcher’s mitt, waking me from my reverie. Mark hadn’t swung. As far as I could determine after the fact, the pitch appeared to have crossed the plate near the outside corner, though possibly a bit on the high side.

I guess I could have lied. I could have called strike three and given the game to the Ravens, to Lori Chang and Ray Santelli. I could have sent Mark Diedrich sobbing back to the dugout, probably scarred for life. But instead I pulled off my mask.

“Jack?” Tim was standing between first and second with his palms open to the sky. “You gonna call it?”

“I can’t,” I told him. “I didn’t see it.”

There was a freedom in admitting it that I hadn’t anticipated, and I dropped my mask to the ground. Then I slipped my arms through the straps of my chest protector and let that fall, too.

“What happened?” Mark Diedrich asked in a quavery voice. “Did I strike out?”

“I don’t know,” I told him.

Boos and angry cries rose from the bleachers as I made my way toward the pitcher’s mound. I wanted to tell Lori Chang that I envied her father, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t understand. She seemed relieved when I walked past her without saying a word. Mikey Fellner was out of the dugout and videotaping me as I walked past second base and onto the grass. He followed me all the way across centerfield, until I climbed the fence over the ad for the Prima Ballerina School of Dance and left the ballpark.

That’s what I wanted my ex-wife and children to see — an umpire walking away from a baseball game, a man who had the courage to admit that he’d failed, who understood that there were times when you had no right to judge, had responsibilities you were no longer qualified to exercise. I hoped they might learn something new about me, something I hadn’t been able to make clear to them in my letters and phone calls.

But of course I was disappointed. What’s in your heart sometimes remains hidden, even when you most desperately want it to be revealed. I remembered my long walk across the outfield as a dignified, silent journey, but on TV I seem almost to be jogging. I look sweaty and confused, a little out of breath as I mumble a string of barely audible excuses and apologies for my strange behavior. If Jeanie and the kids had been watching, all they would have seen was an unhappy man they already knew too well, fleeing from the latest mess he’d made: just me, still trying to explain.