Things That Count by Beth Sherman

by Beth Sherman

It’s been four hours and you’re still sitting in the green bucket chairs, not reading the array of People magazines on the table, as the wall clock barely ticks forward and Ryan sits next to you playing Fruit Ninja on his phone, using his left hand because the right one got hit with a line drive. His third and fourth fingers are an angry shade of purple and the hand itself looks swollen.

But not swollen enough. Heart attack, appendicitis, head injury – these are the things that count in the emergency room.

“Can we get something to eat, Dad?” Ryan says.

You don’t want to get up and go to the cafeteria because you’ll lose your place in line like you’re in the drive-thru of Chick-fil-A.

“In a little while,” you say, thinking why did this have to be your weekend with him? If Leah was here she’d have forced her way in to see a doctor.

There are five other people in the waiting room. One is a man with a nosebleed but apparently, it’s not serious enough either because he’s been waiting longer than you have. You’ve walked over to the front desk so many times the nurse on duty glares as you approach.

“We won,” Ryan says, checking his texts.

When you were a kid, you played second base because you couldn’t catch and everyone knew it. But Ryan is a pitcher, the best one on the team. Although he’s only in fifth grade, they’re already scouting him for Middle School.

“That’s good. Does your hand hurt?”

“A little.”

“More than before?”

“I don’t know.”

You realise you can’t talk to your son anymore. All you do is ask questions and the questions are so basic and pointless about school and sandwiches and field trips, and now the mangled hand, it’s no wonder Ryan tunes you out.

By falling in love with someone other than his mother, you’ve dropped your family in a blender, watched helplessly as the blades relentlessly chop it to pieces. What you really want to ask Ryan is whether he hates you. Instead, you rewind the accident again: The kid at the plate heaving his bat, Ryan stabbing at the ball with his bare hand, then collapsing onto the artificial turf, cradling the hand like a wounded bunny. You sprint onto the field yelling his name and after you reach him there’s not a thing you can do to ease his pain.

“Dad,” Ryan says.

His hair is falling into his eyes and he flinches as you reach over, sweeping some of the ginger strands away from his face.

“Yeah?”

“I hate baseball.”

“Then you don’t have to play.”

“Really?”

You remember the time some kid in preschool told him the tooth fairy wasn’t real and you confirmed it. How you mourned his lost innocence, his three-year-old self already moving away from you.

“Really,” you say, examining Ryan’s injured hand again in the glare of the fluorescent lights.

His fingers are bent like a person with arthritis and it occurs to you that someday Ryan will be a middle-aged man trying to talk to his own kid, to reach that elusive place where fathers and sons say what they mean.