The Season of Long Shadows

The nursing home smelled of disinfectant and boiled vegetables, but Dad kept talking about the baseball game from 1986. The one where he'd caught a foul ball in the ninth inning, me on his shoulders, both of us shouting ourselves hoarse.

"Fourth inning," I corrected gently, though it didn't matter. His Alzheimer's had already rewritten that day a hundred times.

"Whatever, kid. You were there."

I wasn't. Not really. I was three, and the memory he painted so vividly—sunshine, the crack of the bat, the weight of me against his neck—was entirely his. I'd spent thirty years carrying it like it was mine.

The bull in him, that stubborn Irish refusal to surrender anything, had finally met its match. His mind was eroding like a coastline in a hurricane, and the water kept rising. Some days he knew my name. Some days he asked for his mother, dead since 1994.

"You need your vitamins," he said suddenly, sliding a plastic dispenser across the tray table. "Your mother worries about your bones."

My mother had been dead five years. The vitamins were expired—2018 printed on the label—but I dry-swallowed one anyway. Because he needed to feel like he was still taking care of me.

Outside his window, autumn leaves skittered across the parking lot. I thought about all the things I should be doing instead: quarterly reports, performance reviews, the endless corporate performance of pretending any of it mattered. Dad had never played that game. He'd sold insurance for forty years, bull-headed and proud, and come home to watch baseball and drink beer and hold me like I was something precious.

"What's the score?" he asked.

"Bottom of the ninth," I lied. "We're up by two."

He nodded, satisfied. "Good. That's good." His hands trembled as he reached for his water cup. "I taught you that, didn't I? How to watch a game."

"You did."

"And you'll remember? When I'm gone?"

The question caught me in the throat. His mind was full of holes, his body failing, but somewhere beneath the erosion, the man who'd caught that baseball and held me on his shoulders was still there, wondering if anything he'd done would survive him.

"Every inning," I said.

He smiled—a genuine one, reaching his eyes for the first time all day. "Then we're winning, kid. We're winning."