“Put your glove in the bag, Toby. You don’t deserve to wear it right now.”

The words were out of my mouth before we even reached the gravel parking lot.

The air was thick with the smell of cut grass and cheap concession stand popcorn.

It was July of 1992, and the afternoon heat was heavy enough to make your clothes stick to your skin.

Toby was twelve years old, his red baseball cap pushed slightly back on his head, showing the sweat-matted curls on his forehead.

He didn’t argue. He didn’t even look at me.

He just unlaced his Rawlings glove, the one we had spent three weekends breaking in with neat’s-foot oil and a mallet in our driveway, and dropped it into his canvas duffel bag.

His small shoulders were slumped.

I was thirty-eight then, full of that stupid, hard-headed pride that fathers in the nineties wore like armor.

I believed in tough love.

I believed that if you didn’t feel the sting of failure, you would never learn how to fight back.

We got into my old blue Buick.

The vinyl seats were burning hot from sitting in the sun for four hours.

I started the engine, backed out of the space, and began the forty-minute drive back to our small house on Elm Street.

I didn’t turn on the radio.

I wanted him to hear me.

“You let your elbow drop on the third pitch to their shortstop,” I said, my voice flat, hitting him like a hammer.

“I told you three times during practice to keep your weight back. You were lunging.”

Toby just stared out the passenger window.

He watched the green cornfields of Ohio blur past, his reflection in the glass small and frozen.

He didn’t say a single word.

“If you can’t focus when the pressure is on, you shouldn’t be on the mound,” I continued, digging the hole deeper.

“The whole team was counting on you. You let them walk all over you in the sixth.”

I thought I was teaching him.

I thought I was carving out a stronger version of the boy who used to catch pop-flies in the backyard until the streetlights came on.

We had a routine back then.

Every Tuesday and Thursday after my shift at the water treatment plant, we would walk out to the patch of grass behind our garage.

I would wear my old, greasy catcher’s mitt, and he would throw seventy pitches.

We would talk about major league stats, the Cleveland Indians, and how we were going to paint the garage doors that summer.

But on that drive home in July of 1992, I killed all of it.

When we pulled into our driveway, Toby got out of the car, carrying his duffel bag.

He walked straight to his bedroom and closed the door.

He didn’t come down for dinner.