I always hated the sun, even as a child. Blue eyes—the exact same shade as the ones in my father’s head—left me squinting and blind in the sunlight. Something about low melanin levels. Even on a day when I’d been uniformed in a red baseball cap—band too spacious around my crown, bill sitting too heavy and sliding down over eyebrows ten shades darker than the hair sprouting from my head. Another thing I’d inherited from my father.

I swatted at it each time it slipped too low, shielding my impassive view of bases being rounded. I’d attempted to remove it but Mrs. Carrillo had scolded me. Gasp. How would we find you if you wandered off? I’d looked up to my father, world’s most indifferent field trip chaperone, and watched his shrug. He was never one to deny someone else’s authority in favor of his own and so I put the cap back on, cursing Mrs. Carrillo and using our newfound knowledge from religion class to pray for a home run that—blind to—would crack my skull open, forcing her to leave primary education—shamed—lead her to a life of heavy drinking and regret (a life that would pair nicely with all the chain-smoking she did behind the chapel when she thought her kindergarten class couldn’t see.)

So I sat in the sea of bored fathers and red-capped five-year-olds, kicking legs I wouldn’t learn to shave for another five years. Dreaming of lunch.

But something pulled me from the spot on the mound where my lacking attention had settled. A disturbance in the crowd, an excited hubbub rippling in the tie-dye—browned by unsteady hands—surrounding me.

A foul ball.

I jumped from my seat only a second after Annie Gill—who, five years after we would all start shaving our legs, would lose her own father to a heart attack.

I hadn’t seen it but I knew that the ball soared. Floated high over the netting, atop the paltry weekday crowd. Right to where my class was grouped: small, hairy legs jumping with excitement, sticky hands skyward.

Right into my father’s thick palm.

I grinned. And how could I not? What a prize to bring back today, something to keep the attention on me, something to lord over everyone else—graciously, of course, I would allow everyone to pass it around on the bus ride back to school. Suddenly, this blistering day was no longer without reward. Suddenly, today was a day when something had happened.

I turned to my father to retrieve my prize. My father, who was never a second late to pick me up from school, who served us two eggs, two slices of microwaved bacon in the morning, cut our toasties into the number one-hundred and eleven (his favorite joke to make at the expense of mothers who had the time and money for animal-shaped sandwich cutters) and grinned just the same as I did when I rushed him upon his arrival home. Who’d given me his blue eyes—a strange ring of navy around the edge—that had us both squinting at the sun.

My father, who bent down, foul ball in his hand, and gave it to a boy in my class.