Jason’s heart fell. “She’s not here, Buddy. You’re at Daddy’s now.” He supposed he could have dialed her number and let him say goodnight; but how many times had she done that for him? None. Not once.
He leaned over and hugged Rafe tightly. “You’ll see Mommy tomorrow night,” he said brightly. “Come on, let’s go read a story.”
The next morning he took Rafe to the pool, a small aquamarine rectangle behind their building, and everything seemed fine. “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” Jason shouted, jumping feet first into the pool. Rafe laughed, running anxiously in place, waiting for his dad to break the surface. Then, “Rotten egg!” Rafe shouted and ran off the edge into the water. Jason waited for him to surface and when he didn’t, reached down and pulled him up sputtering and coughing and laughing all at once.
“Hey,” he said. “We have to teach you how to swim.”
“OK, Daddy.”
The rest of that weekend was like a dream, the nondescript Palo Alto apartment magically transformed into a true home by the addition of his son. Saturday evening Jason grilled hamburgers and steamed frozen vegetables and they ate on the balcony overlooking the man-made stream. After dinner, Rafe discovered the Indian Village of wooden figures and cloth wigwams Jason had bought at Nature’s Way. Rafe carefully arranged the Indians around a campfire, along with wooden horses and two plastic rocket ships from a Lego set. While he played, Jason read Stolen Seasons, a hilarious and heartening book that Vuco had recommended about life in the minor leagues. He was immersed in the story of Steve Dalkowsky, a legendary lefty whose fastballs tore through screens behind home plate and who once struck out sixteen batters and walked sixteen in the same game, when he heard Rafe speak up.
“What’s that, buddy?”
“Indians don’t wear underwear,” Rafe announced.
Jason smiled and set the book down. “What do they wear?”
“Skin deer.”
He pressed his lips to keep from laughing. “Deer skin?” Jason asked gently.
“Yeah, deer skin.” Rafe held up the figure of a brave carrying the carcass of a deer over his shoulder. “Why do Indians hunt with bows and arrows?”
“That’s how they got their food.”
“Is that where you get hamburgers?”
Jason shook his head. “I bought those at the store.”
As with any dream, however, it had to end. The next day at 3 PM, forty-eight hours after Raphael had exploded from the back seat of his grandmother’s car, they returned to the same playground to say goodbye. When the Cadillac glided to a stop against the curb, Jason picked up Rafe and hugged him fiercely. Legally, he couldn’t see him until a week from Wednesday, and then just for the night. “You be a good boy,” he said. “Daddy’s going to be right here waiting for you.”
“Do you want a cookie, Daddy?” Rafe held out a small baggie with half a dozen chocolate-covered graham crackers that he’d brought to share with Gramma Anna.
“No thanks, Buddy,” Jason said. “Save those for Grandma.”
Then, in a ritual that would be repeated too many times over the coming years, he watched his little boy leaving in the back seat of someone else’s car.
STRIKE TWO
Top o’ the 10th ...
Tobias Barlow USA TODAY
In the male bastion of baseball, fatherhood is a large, yet largely unspoken subject. I’m sure it’s hard to focus on your littlest fans when thousands of others are praising you night after night on fields of play. But all that changes when those littlest fans don’t have the opportunity to see their daddy, or vice versa. Absence makes the heart go ponder.
Kids, ironically, were the subject when I caught up with Cincinnati Reds’ lefthander Jason Thibodeaux at the Margaret Adams Strohmeyer Senior Center in downtown River City. On home stands Thibodeaux serves lunches and assists the physical therapy staff with the rehab of elderly patients who have had their hips, knees and other worn parts replaced. He’s here, he says, because he can’t stand the sight of kids.
After losing a child custody battle, Thibodeaux sees his 8-year-old son, Raphael, only during the off-season — and on the single road trip the Reds make to San Francisco, where Raphael lives. Under a court-enforced formula, Thibodeaux and his son spend an average of six weeks out of fifty-two — every other weekend and every other Wednesday for four months, and that one precious road trip to the Golden Gate.
A lot of ball players work with youth, but Thibodeaux went the other way. “Every time I see a group of kids I think of Rafe and how much I miss him. Plus I get a lot of satisfaction working here. I never had the chance to take care of my own parents, so this is a way of paying them back.”
Not that some of his current charges don’t act like kids. After lunch, a man rolls up in a wheelchair and thrusts a copy of Sports Illustrated into Thibodeaux’s hands, who pens ‘Best Wishes, Ted’ and hands it back. “He says it’s for his nephews, but he’s got dozens of these in his room,” Thibodeaux laughs.
Thibodeaux has struggled on the mound this year — he’s 8-11, with a 4.37 ERA. But to the residents of the Margaret Adams Strohmeyer Senior Center, he throws a perfect game every time he shows. The fan he cares most about, however, isn’t here to see it.
THE REMOTE-CONTROLLED BIG WHEELS “HOT ROD” lay overturned on the carpet. There was a tabletop Air Hockey game from Ryan Habbegger and his mom, Sam Trainor’s silly “Booger Sculpture” kit, a 10-pound bag of multicolored marbles, a biography of Beethoven, and a dozen or more classical and jazz piano CDs scattered amidst torn wrapping paper and ribbons on the living room floor of Vicki’s townhouse on Diamond Heights in San Francisco. There had been pizza and crudités, cake and ice cream and candles, and on cue Rafe’s buddies Laslow Samuels and Angel Villanueva from the Aurora Craverro School of the Arts had broken into a version of “Happy Birthday” on a piccolo and kazoo as the two delivery men from Sherman Clay wheeled the shiny new Yamaha upright into the room with a fancy candelabra blazing on top.
The party was over, the guests gone, the methodical plunkings of Rafe’s shortened version of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata #2 a fastfading memory. Rafe sat at the kitchen table overlooking Glen Canyon, his fingers speeding along the Acer keyboard playing “Major League Baseball 9.0”. The laptop and software from his Dad arrived by DHL just that morning in a big yellow box addressed to Master Raphael Thibodeaux. His friends thought it was cool that his father was a Major League baseball player, though that wasn’t such an easy thing. His mother said that baseball was for morons, which didn’t make much sense as his dad wasn’t a moron, but still, it would have been easier if his dad was a musician because that was what his mom loved most. Baseball took his dad all around the country and Rafe hardly ever saw him during the season. He had only seen him play once in person, and never on TV — though that was about to change. The Craverro School didn’t allow students to watch television or use computers until they were eight. Today he was eight.
“Rafe!” his mother called from the living room. “Time for bed.”
He glanced at the kitchen clock. “It’s only nine o’clock.”
“Which is your bed time. C’mon.”
He wasn’t sure who hit it but a single flared through the Orioles’ infield and Rafe, pulling the fielders in, threw the runner out at second trying to stretch the hit. It was a great game, the players responded to his slightest touch, flinging fastballs, flying vertically along the grass to spear line drives, reaching above the wall to steal home runs from bigshouldered sluggers like David Ortiz and Ryan Howard.
“Rafe.” Vicki stared at him from the living room doorway.
“Mom,