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these men will bundle me into a van if I’m not careful, chop me up into dog meat, or worse. Mom is never specific about what actually happens in the van, which only makes it more scary.
    So: I keep my head down, and I don’t meet those men’s eyes. Ever. Mom is holding my hand but you can never be too safe, that’s a thing I know; a thing I have been told, over and over.
    Just once, I see something that makes me feel sad, instead of scared. It’s a family, all out together; I think they’re going to have a picnic. The dad has the younger child, a girl, on his shoulders, and she’s laughing. The other kid, a boy, is walking along kicking a soccer ball, chatting to the mom, who is smiling like there’s a light inside her and she has to let it out. In fact, all of them are smiling, and this is what gets me, squeezes my heart –
    I think, I would like that – a brother, a dad.
    But instead I’m on the outside, and even though it’s so hot, the feeling is a cold one, the feeling of looking into a brightly lit room that you’re locked out of.
    I shiver, and I look away from the family.
    There’s a shimmering haze at the edge of the park and the sun is white above us, in a cloudless sky. Mom is sweating in the heat – herhand is clammy around mine, slippery but strong, like being held by a squid. I know she doesn’t want to be doing this and I feel guilty and warm inside, at the same time.
    When we get to the empty part, Mom puts down the bag she’s carrying and takes out the ball and the bat. I don’t know if this is the first time I play – it’s my first memory of it, anyway. But I must have got the idea of batting from somewhere, so maybe it isn’t the first time.
    Anyway.
    So Mom hands me the bat and then she walks a couple of dozen paces away. It’s a softball and Mom is overweight, not athletic at all, so when she throws it, the ball falls short and she shrugs her shoulders at me, moves closer. Seeing her try to pitch to me, the effort she’s putting into it, makes me feel again that strange mixture of pleasure and shame.
    Closer up, she does better – the ball comes at me flat and I swat at it, miss. The next one I hit – it lofts into the gauzy summer air, arcs over Mom’s head, and bounces on the dried-out grass; twice, three times.
    Mom shuffles off to get it. She’s not quick, but she doesn’t complain, and when she comes back she just throws again, and I swing.
    That all you got?
she says with a smile when she brings the ball back.
    I smile too, and the next one, I hit harder, almost to the edge of the park, where the low suburban homes start. The air is so dry that it’s like breathing in sand. Mom’s hair is dark with sweat when she brings the ball back, yet again.
    But she keeps going: the ball flying, a slow parabola in the shiningsummer sky; and Mom going to get it, as fast as she can manage, despite her size.
    And my heart? My heart swells till it feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest. Because there’s my mom, my unfit, sports-hating mom, chasing after the balls I’m hitting, throwing to me over and over, the perspiration running down her in rivulets.
    I’m only a kid, and I guess when you’re a kid you just think about yourself most of the time, you don’t think about your parents or how much they love you, but on that day, in that memory, I know it – I see it blazing out of my mom’s every moment, this fierce love.
    I don’t know how long we kept that up, the batting. I know that in my memory, it doesn’t end, and that makes me think we were there for hours, but it could have been a half-hour. I don’t know – I don’t remember leaving the park, I just remember the joy of the bat meeting the ball, the perfect, mathematically precise track of the ball through the sky, and my mom bringing it back, again and again.
    And thinking about it is good, because it makes me feel less mad about Mom fussing over me, and Mark, and the horrible fear that I saw in her eyes