I was speechless and the old man answered for me.

“Andy.”

“Last name again, paisan?”

My father spelled it slowly and the Great DiMaggio inscribed the balls to me. We had ninety seconds to bask in the Presence before we were hustled away, the old man’s hand still extended for the handshake that wasn’t meant to be.

Saturday we would get up at dawn for an early start. The old man’s sight wasn’t what it used to be, fucking diabetes, and he wanted to be home before dark. But we had one last night away from the watchful eye of my mother. He heaped sour cream on his baked potato and ordered two scoops of ice cream and a slab of Black Forest cake, but he seemed to chew his food without tasting it. He was distracted, a million miles away, and when the waitress was slow to bring the change, he was irritated, mumbling under his breath. I was sure I’d done something to spoil his evening, that I’d slipped up, embarrassed him. I shrank when he reached for me in the parking lot, certain he was going to reward me with one of his harmless swats for some transgression. But all he wanted to do was rub his hand on my head.

“Tired?” he asked.

“No,” I said, lying.

He wasn’t interested in talking with his friends at the bar, dismissing the drunk who wanted to argue Ted Williams’s claim as the Greatest Living Ball Player. He ordered another shot and a beer to chase it. “Asshole,” he muttered. “Just another goddamn jerk running his goddamn mouth about things he doesn’t know shit about.”

“Your teachers think you’re real smart,” he said, firing up another smoke. “Father Gillen too.”

He told the bartender to pull him another draft and bring another Coke for his son. I sat up straight on my stool and nodded at the bartender, making sure there was no mistaking I was that son and this was my dad.

“I bet you can be anything you want to be. A doctor. A lawyer. An engineer.”

He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Don’t ever let me see you pick up a baseball bat again or I’ll break both your hands.”

It’s getting on for eleven Friday night and I’m sitting at the bar of the Carousel, again, nursing a beer, furious with Matt, angry with myself for telling him that goddamn story. I should have known that fucking priest would never understand, that he’d make some stupid comment.

“You must have been very frightened when your father threatened you like that,” he said, expecting revelations and catharsis.

Frustrated, mad, rejected. Those were the emotions my father could arouse, not frightened. He could pop and sputter, his face a virtual pyrotechnic display while he bellowed like a wounded ox. He might give my backside a gentle whack or drop a soft knuckle rap on my skull. Once he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my eyes rolled back in my head, not because he was angry, but because he was terrified when I absorbed a brutal shock after sticking a screwdriver into an electrical outlet. But he never hit me. Not once. Never. Corporal punishment was strictly a maternal duty.

I order another Heineken, wondering what ever happened to those goddamn baseballs. They sat on my bedside table until I left for college. I’m growing more tolerant of the ordained clergy as my blood alcohol level rises After all, Father Gillen had proven to be a sage counselor. The old man quickly forgot his prohibition when I begged to join the Gastonia Little Cherokees a few weeks after we returned from Clearwater. I threw like a girl, dropped every ball, and flailed at the plate, but not one of my teammates dared to taunt or mock me or even snicker behind my back, fearing the wrath of their fathers who gathered to watch the graceful arc of my old man’s swing as he shagged fly balls to their sons. They were awestruck by his stillness at the plate, mesmerized by his power, spellbound by the sound of one ball after another being smacked into the outfield. Bullshit, he spat, his anger startling an admirer who told him he could have been another DiMaggio.

I never graduated to Pony League, moving on to solitary endeavors like the swimming pool and the speed bag. I grew bigger and stronger while my father slowly faded away. He looked odd in his new glasses, almost bookish; his face gradually seemed to shrink behind the ever-thickening lenses of stronger and stronger prescriptions. Eventually he couldn’t go out in the daylight without sunglasses and, finally, his driver’s license was revoked, making him dependent on my mother.

The last time I saw him wear dress shoes was when he danced at Regina ’s wedding. From then on, it was slippers and white socks until he lost his right foot to gangrene. He worked hard at his rehab, insisting he’d learn to walk without a limp or a hobble, but never succeeding before they told him they needed to take the leg below the knee. The procedure was a success. He was recovering nicely. His vital organs, battered by years of exposure to high glucose levels, had withstood the trauma better than had been expected. You’ll be in skilled nursing when I come back next weekend, I promised, the crisis over, the obligations of Tar Heel Heritage beckoning. He was sitting up in bed, leaning forward, his gown dropped to his waist. I rubbed his bare shoulders, no muscle left to massage, just flaps of loose skin that yielded under the gentle pressure of my hands. Look at that, I said, as the Phillies All-Star lefty first baseman launched a magnificent opposite field three-run bomb, dooming the Braves to their fourth loss in a row. Turn it off, he said, I want to go home. Soon, I promised. Later that night, he was restless, unable to sleep, complaining he was cold, his gown damp with sweat. He insisted the staff turn up the lights in his room, trying to keep the dark at bay, and kept calling for my mother, who was standing beside him, unable to calm and reassure him. He struggled to crawl out of bed, resisting the efforts to restrain him, trying to escape the inevitable, if only for another hour or two. He coded just before midnight.

He was lying in the morgue when Alice and I arrived from High Point at five in the morning. My mother was about to sign the consent to the autopsy to confirm the obvious, postoperative cardiac arrest, when I ripped the form from her hands and tore it to shreds. He’s dead, he’s fucking dead. Why do you want to cut him up again? My wife and mother and sister, for once, were silent in the face of my ferocity. The night before he was buried, I wrote him a long letter, recording every minute of every day of that week in Florida. I’m sure most of it happened just as I remembered. I slipped it in the pocket of his jacket before the undertaker closed the coffin lid. When I think of him now, he’s never old, feeble, broken. He’s that magnificent animal he was when I was a boy, the man I’ll never be, able to swat a baseball a hundred, thousand, million feet, then spit in his hands and do it again, never breaking a sweat.

“Hi. You remember me?”

He startles me, pulling me from my sentimental reverie.

He looks vaguely familiar. Ordinary. Could be a dozen different guys.

“I’m Harold. We met right before Thanksgiving.”

“Sure…sure. Hey, how you doing?” I say, determined not to be my usual rude self.

“You’re Andy, right?”

“Right.”

“Can I buy you a beer?”

“That’s great, but I really have to go. Someone’s waiting up for me,” I say.

“Your boyfriend?” he asks, his face sagging with disappointment.

“Believe it or not, my mother. I still have a curfew.” I laugh, a too-subtle joke at the expense of a man who’s way too old to be referring to anyone as a boyfriend.

“Next time, then,” he says, obviously cheered by my revelation.

“Next time. It’ll be on me.”

Only once I’m in the car do I realize he was wearing a White Sox jersey. It comes back to me. He was the guy in the Tar Heels hoodie who gave me a chaste kiss last November. What a doofus, I think, smiling. Wonder what he’d think about my encounter with the Great DiMaggio? I’ll have to remember to tell him if I ever see him again.