"You want to show them again?" Cameron asked.
Noah smiled. The nervousness was still there, a faithful animal. The determination had grown larger teeth.
"Only if you pitch to me yourself," Noah said. "No machine."
Cameron laughed, jogged to a makeshift rubber, and nodded to Ortiz — gray at the temples too now, catching again for the charity bit. Frank Callahan cupped his hands around his mouth from the stands.
"Don't miss, kid!" he shouted, and this time the words were a blessing wearing the costume of a jab.
Cameron wound and threw a clean, medium fastball under the bright field lights, summer evening thick with popcorn and cut grass and the particular electricity of unfinished stories. Noah watched the ball. He waited. He swung.
The crack climbed the seats the way it had when he was ten, only louder, cleaner, the sound of a boy who had become a young man without abandoning the first true thing he had ever claimed for himself. The ball carried into the outfield grass and rolled to a stop near the warning track like a period at the end of a long, careful sentence.