It was enormous. It was aggressively glittery. Two parents nearby looked at it with expressions that fell somewhere between impressed and alarmed. Ethan stared at the sign. Then he looked at her.
She was wearing a blue jacket and she had clearly done something quickly with her hair and she was slightly flushed from rushing and she was looking at him the way she'd looked at him across a bar table last Friday night directly without performance without an exit ramp. You made a sign, he said. I said I would. There's glitter involved. I committed to the glitter, Ethan.
He looked at the sign again. He looked at her. Something moved through him that was somewhere between gratitude and terror and the very beginning of something he didn't have a name for yet. And he made the decision quick clean before the careful part of him could construct an argument and said I'm glad you're here. Not thanks for coming.
Lily will love it. I'm glad you're here. Two words about himself offered without a buffer which was the bravest sentence structure he'd managed in 4 years. Clare looked at him for a moment. I know, she said softly.
Me too. On the field, Lily Parker walked up to home plate, adjusted her helmet with both hands, and looked out at the pitcher with the focused of someone who had studied this moment and was ready for it. Ethan watched her. Clare stood beside him close enough that their arms were touching. Neither of them moved away.
The pitcher threw. Lily swung. The crack of the bat was clean and true, and the ball sailed into left field, and Lily took off running with everything she had, and the people in the stands made noise, and Ethan's throat tightened with pride. And Clare grabbed his arm without thinking and said, "Go, Lily, go, go, go." And Lily rounded first base and kept running.
And Ethan Parker stood in the thin morning light of a Colorado October with a woman who had showed up with a glittery sign and her arm through his watching his daughter run like the world was hers. And for the first time in 4 years, he did not feel like a man holding everything together with his bare hands. He felt like a man who was finally carefully terrifyingly letting someone else help him hold it. Lily hit the ball three more times that morning, not all of them clean. The second one tipped off the bat and rolled about 8 ft before the pitcher scooped it up.
And Lily made a face that was pure Parker, that specific expression of someone who knows they can do better and is annoyed at themselves for not doing it right now. But the third one sailed into left field again. And the fourth one, the last atbat of the game, she hit with her whole body. every pound of her 7-year-old self rotating into it, and it went farther than anything any kid on either team had hit all morning. Clare screamed, not politely, not with the measured enthusiasm of someone who was performing support. She screamed with both hands around her mouth and the glittery sign waving overhead and pure unfort. and two parents nearby actually startled.
And Ethan looked at her sideways with an expression that was equal parts surprised and completely delighted. She did it. Clare grabbed his arm again. Ethan, did you see that? I saw it.
She crushed it. That ball is still going. She's been practicing in the backyard for 3 weeks. You didn't tell me that. I'm telling you now.