The Fox at First Base

Margot sorted her father's pills into the plastic organizer: white for the blood pressure, yellow for the cholesterol, the purple gelcap that contained enough **vitamin** D to last a small mammal a winter. She'd never admit it to David—her boyfriend of three months who kept asking when she'd visit, as if her father's decline were a social obligation—but part of her dreaded these Sunday visits. The man in the bed bore only a passing resemblance to the man who'd taught her to swing a bat in their backyard in Waukegan, who'd taken her to Cubs games even after her mother left, who'd carried a baseball glove in his trunk until his hands shook too much to use it.

"There's a **fox** again," her father said, nodding toward the window where nothing moved but the curtain's shadow. "Red as a Communist, right there on the lawn."

Margot didn't correct him. She'd learned months ago that correction only brought the sharp panic back into his eyes—the humiliation that struck faster than the disease itself. Instead she went to the window and looked out at the manicured grass, the empty courtyard, the bird feeder that swung empty in the wind.

"I see him," she said. "Beautiful."

"Reminds me," her father said, and for a moment his eyes cleared, "that summer you played softball. First base. You dove for a line drive—split your knee open, blood all down your shin, but you held that ball like your life depended on it. Coach carried you off the field. You cried, but not from the pain. You cried because you thought you'd let the team down."

Margot hadn't thought about that summer in twenty years. She'd forgotten the dive, the blood, the shame of being carried. She remembered only what came after: her father driving her to get ice cream, his big hand warm on her shoulder, telling her that courage wasn't about not being scared—it was about being scared and diving anyway.

"I remember," she said.

"Good," he said. "That's who you are."

She thought about David, who'd told her last week that she was too rigid, too guarded, who wanted her to open up but didn't understand that opening meant first being broken. She thought about the vitamins in her own bathroom cabinet, the ones she took every morning because she was forty now and her body needed help that her father's never had. She thought about how she'd stopped diving for things years ago.

"Dad," she said, "I think I need to start playing again."

He smiled, the genuine one that still lived somewhere behind the fog. "First base?"

"First base."

Outside, a fox—real this time, lean and rust-colored—slipped through the hedge and vanished. Margot watched it go, already planning the call she'd make to David when she got to the car. Not to break up, but to ask if he'd ever played baseball.