Page 92 of The Fall Classic

“That’s the whole problem: I don’t know. Watching Liesel and Lucas both move on with their lives has felt disproportionately big for something so natural. When I lost my mom, I felt like a part of me was cut out forever, and it can never grow back. Every change in my life feels like a smaller version of that. These chunks of me keep getting taken out, and then they’re just gone forever.”

“Okay. And what’s the problem with that?”

“Like I said: They don’t grow back.”

“What if they don’t need to grow back? What if you’re allowed to grow around them?”

My mind goes instantly to a tree—not the Tree, but a willow in my backyard in Chicago. It’s a big beautiful tree with a gnarly-looking trunk that Lucas once gouged out with an axe when we were nine. He always hated school, and our fourth grade teacher made it worse. Our teacher compared Lucas to me and especially Liesel a lot. One day after being humiliated, he came home and grabbed an axe from the garage and started whaling on the tree. Mom flipped when she saw him from the kitchen window. She ran outside, grabbed the axe, and sent him to our room until dinner.

She never knew the teacher was belittling him, saying it was a good thing he was athletic, because any career where he had to read a book would never be an option.

My mom never knew it, but Liesel and I did. I think we were all shocked when the tree didn’t die. A tough, bumpy callus started forming around the wound, and the tree miraculously kept growing.

Dad had a landscaper come out, and the man explained that the willow would probably close the gap over the injury but that the part around the wound would likely decay and leave a hollow core as the tree grew.

There’s something beautiful about that to me.

“Maybe,” I tell Dr. Chang.

“Logan, we’ve been doing this for, what, four, five months? You’ve been gripping too long for two seasons—ever since you switched to throwing a knuckleball. Why don’t you go back to your other pitches?”

“Doug wants a knuckleballer.”

“Doug wants good pitchers, and you were on his radar before you even made the switch. Knuckleball is the hardest pitch to throw. Of every pitch out there, why that one?”

I feel like I’m staring at his pen again, my chest getting tight, my throat closing. “I don’t know.”

A soft clicking comes from his desk clock—a sign we’re out of time—but after he turns it off, he doesn’t kick me out. “You should spend some time thinking about this. Maybe in the tank Thursday morning.”

I glance back out the window. The riding lawn mower has moved halfway across the field, still cutting the kind of diagonal patterns into the grass that I get nostalgic for the second every season ends.

“Logan.” He waits until I look at him. “I don’t know how to tell you the difference between clinging to this girl and caring about her. But I don’t think you’re asking for permission to care about her, are you?”

“No.”

“Right. Because you already do.”

“Yes.”

“Then I imagine you’re wondering how much caring about her will cost you.”

“Yes.”

“A lot.” He smiles. “The more she’s worth, so to speak, the more it’ll cost you, no matter how or when things end—in eight weeks or eighty years. Caring comes with a steep price. The question is whether or not you’re willing to pay it. And whether it’ll pay off.”

“That’s what I want. I want to know if it’s going to work out. If it’s going to last.”

“Nobody knows that going in. You have to decide if the pain of not trying outweighs the pain of trying and getting hurt. I’m sure there’s a baseball metaphor somewhere in there I’m missing.”

I appreciate his smile, his moment of lightness in the middle of something so serious. I don’t know if there’s a baseball metaphor there or not. But he asked why I wanted to throw knuckleballs, and something tells me the two are related.

I don’t say anything.

“You know you tend to grip too long and too hard sometimes, and that awareness is allowing you to work on it. If you think you’re doing the same with Georgie or your brother or sister, work on it.”

“Gee, that sounds easy.”

He barks a laugh. “Yeah, no problem. I expect you’ll have it figured out by next week. Give or take.”