Natural Order by Brian Francis

baseball. Charlie bought him a new glove and a Louisville Slugger bat with an orange handle.
    “I’m afraid of the ball,” John had confessed to me once. “What if it hits me in the face and then I have to go to the hospital and have an operation?”
    “The ball won’t hit you if you practise catching it,” I pointed out, but my words were useless. I knew my son. The more we encouraged, the more he resisted. I’d sit on the bleachers and look at the misery on his eight-year-old face in right field, his glove hanging grotesquely at his side like a monster’s hand, and wonder how much it was worth in the end. I’d have to clamp my arms around my legs and fight the urge to run out onto the field and rescue him.
    But I couldn’t do that. I’d made a promise to myself to always protect my son. To help him. To keep him on a path towards happiness. Charlie wouldn’t have understood this if I’d spoken to him. He didn’t know what I knew. He couldn’t see the darker side of things that I did. He didn’t know what was at stake.
    It was Charlie who finally pulled the plug on baseball. I don’t think he could bear to watch John suffer through it anymore, although that wasn’t the reason he gave me.
    “It’s too expensive,” he said one night while we lay in bed. “There’s no point spending the money if he’s not willing to put up the effort.”
    “He’s tried, Charlie,” I said, hoping to hide the relief in my voice. John would be over the moon when I told him. “It’s just not his thing. We’ll get him involved in something else. Soccer, maybe. Or swimming.”
    “He hates the water.”
    “He likes drawing. We could sign him up for art classes.”
    Charlie was silent. I looked over at him. His jaw was peppered with stubble. I noted the tiny beginnings of lines around his eyes. We’d been married for almost ten years. I knew his favourite foods and the faint brown ring around his penis and that he was often constipated on account of shift work. I knew that he could spend hours listening to country music in the den and that he kept a childhood photograph of himself and his sister in his wallet and that he wrote his mother a letter every Saturday night, slipping a lined sheet beneath a blank one so that his words appeared as neatly as possible. But I didn’t know him . At least, not the way I thought husbands and wives were supposed to know each other.
    “I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong,” he said after a while. “John always seems uncomfortable around me.”
    “That’s not true,” I said, even though I noticed it as well. I didn’t understand. Charlie wasn’t an intimidating figure by any stretch, but it seemed that was how John saw him. There was an air of caution about John when he was around his father, as though he was taking the tentative first steps on an ice-covered pond.
    “He’s all peaches and cream with you,” Charlie said. “I just don’t know how to be around him. Maybe it’s my own fault. What kind of experience can I draw on? I barely even remember my own dad.”
    “You’re a good father,” I said. “I can see that. John can see that. He’s just at an awkward age.”
    “Then why does his world revolve around you?”
    I didn’t know how to answer this.
    It was true that I couldn’t shake John off me. Everything was “Mommy this” and “Mommy that.” It was suffocating at times. I remember when we took John to see Santa at the mall. Something spooked him and he bolted off Santa’s lap and came barrelling down the red carpet. Charlie was with him at the time. I was across the way at a clothing store, trying to steal a few uninterrupted minutes. John ran straight past Charlie and over to me. He buried his face so forcefully in my jacket that I almost toppled over. I looked up to see Charlie, bewildered, surrounded by a landscape of cotton-batten snow and sparkle-dusted mechanical elves.
    “John, you could’ve run to Daddy,” I whispered. “He was right