Fathers & Sons & Sports Read Online Free

patio of the house I’ve moved out of, my soon-to-be ex-wife dribbles a ball, counting down the time. “Five seconds, four …” Elaine sets her feet and heaves a shot that bows the plastic rim before rattling off. I rebound her miss off the backboard. Luke, our seven-year-old only child, stares at me, befuddled. He isn’t used to seeing me in his mother’s yard, almost two years after our separation, and is even less used to seeing us horse around as if those years, and the last few of oureleven-year marriage, hadn’t been deadly. But it’s the first mild evening of a belated spring, and Elaine and I are gamely making an effort. Not merely to get on better, but to draw him out of the house, where he is more and more the hostage of his disorder.
    Sizing a free throw, I glance at Luke, who has begun to point with both hands to the door. We’ve been out here five minutes, and already the uh-oh moment, his balky signal that he’s had it with novelty. What he wants, with a tireless monomania, is the same thing he’s wanted for the past four years: to be alone with his TV/VCR. There, he will swap Elmo tapes in and out of the slot while hopping up and down, flapping his arms. Left alone for any time, he’ll strip off his clothes, then alternate between flapping his arms and fondling himself. With my stress level spiking—I am always clenched now, conditioned by his history of seizures and meltdowns to anticipate the worst—I hit upon a thought. Tossing a flat shot off the chest-high rim, I grab the ball and hand it to him. Luke stares at it, turning it this way and that, as if trying to recall this Spalding fellow whose name appears between the seams. “Jam it!” says his mother. “Throw it down!” For encouragement, she pelts him with kisses.
    He reflects a while longer, looks at both of us, and tosses the ball behind him in the weeds. “Bye,” he says, and starts up the stairs, unbuttoning himself as he goes. He stops and waves, my receding son. “Bye,” he says. “Buh-bye.”
    From the beginning the signs were bad, and they worsened as we went forward. Luke was floppy at birth, with muscles so weakhis mouth wouldn’t latch to his mother’s breast. He was late rolling over, later sitting up, and was so late learning to crawl we thought he had cerebral palsy. Those first years were a roundelay of doctors, with each more stumped than the last. Meanwhile, time passed, and Luke’s companions stood up on two legs and left him, running after the other kids in the park. Here was a parent’s vision of hell: a child whose nameless condition was so dire that two-year-olds had cast him out.
    We swept in quickly and found therapists and teachers, getting him home-based treatments early on. Disabled though he was, I was fixed on raising a son who could delight in his body like other kids. Even before he crawled I put him on the floor, rolling balls to him in our master bedroom. He had a natural arm and loved playing catch, though he lacked the least instinct for cupping his hands and seeing the ball safely into his grasp. Still, I took heart and bought him the equipment: a Little Tikes backboard with a weighted base, a football net with a ball he could kick (with help) and a set of oversize bowling pins that he thought were a scream to knock down.
    Approaching his third birthday, he suddenly started walking, and our hopes briefly jumped up with him. Soon he was running, and I took him to the park with our trove of balls to try to engage him with boys his age. It worked for a while; he got a kick out of making other kids chase down his errant throws. But one day a boy plucked the ball from his hands, and Luke howled as though he’d been slugged. It was a tantrum from hell, wild-eyed andgasping, the other parents looking on in horror. In a matter of weeks he lost interest in the park, and jerked away when I drove up to it, screaming his one word: “No!” The greater loss, though, was his pleasure in playing ball,