Although the plane was half empty, I got stuck next to a woman who began talking the instant I sat down and didn’t stop until I got up again, told her I had a great deal of work to do, and changed seats. I wasn’t in the mood to be civil. There were only so many hours before New York and I wanted to try to figure out as much as I could. After we landed, there wouldn’t be time for thought.

Once we were airborne, the stewardess came round asking for drink orders. I would have killed for a double anything, but bit my tongue and asked for a ginger ale instead. I was exhausted and a drink would put me right to sleep. Sitting by a window, I watched as the plane tipped and banked, then found its way and leveled out over the black and yellow twinkling below. I remembered driving over tonight and seeing planes coming in. How romantic and heart-lifting the sight. Yet how lonesome and small I felt now, climbing up into that same sky.

We passed over a baseball stadium with all its lights still on after a night game. Seeing the field reminded me of an unsettling discussion Lily and I had had a few weeks before.

Like Lincoln, I had always loved baseball. Until I was fifteen or so, the nucleus of every summer was the game, whether that meant watching it on television, playing catch with my friends, talking about it with the barber when I went in for a ballplayer’s crew cut, trading Topps baseball cards with others…

The minute I was old enough to play in Little League, I begged my parents to sign me up. They did, and one of the proudest memories of my young life was walking into the living room after dinner one night wearing for the first time my robin’s-egg-blue baseball cap and T-shirt that said the name of our sponsor, “Nick’s Shell Station,” on the front. My team was named the Yankees, thank God, which made life even better because this was in one of the periodic heydays of the New York Yankees and all of the men who played on that great team were my heroes. Mom put down her crossword puzzle and said I looked “very nice.” But Dad paid me the supreme compliment. Giving me a careful once-over, he said I looked just like Moose Skowron, Yankee first baseman and my favorite player.

Our first game was also opening day of the season that year and many people came out to watch. I was assigned to right field, the equivalent of Siberia in Little League because no child ever hits a ball there. However, our coach thought it was a good place for me because I couldn’t catch for beans and would do the least damage there. Which didn’t bother me a bit because hitting was my dream, not fielding. Nothing felt better than whipping that Louisville Slugger bat around and once in a spectacular while feeling the great “clunk” of wood connecting with the ball. That’s what I lived for, not putting a huge leather glove up in the air to stop a ball from sailing by. Batting was heroic, fielding was only necessary.

Our opponents that first game were the Dodgers, a good team, but fearsome too because their star pitcher was none other than Jeffrey Alan Sapsford. His fastball, even then, would have struck out Moose Skowron.

By the fifth inning we were losing nine to nothing. I’d batted twice and struck out both times. Besides that, I’d dropped an easy fly ball and been yelled at by half my team. I knew I deserved their hatred. I was a bum, we were losing, the world was doom. Worse, my parents were there witnessing the debacle. I knew my father had skipped meeting the seven o’clock train (his biggest haul of tired customers) so he could be on hand for my debut. Some debut. I’d failed him, my team, the name Yankees.

The last time I got up to hit, Jeffrey Alan Sapsford looked at me with gleeful disdain. Unforgettably, his second baseman yelled, “Easy out!” and he was talking about me. The whole world had heard. I, the heir to Moose Skowron’s throne, was fixed in everyone’s mind as an “easy out.” Try erasing that kind of mark from your record when you’re that age.

Sapsford threw his first pitch and, without thinking, I swung and knocked the ball five hundred and forty miles into deep center field. I hit it so hard and far that the other team froze as one watching the ball soar off into that deep green infinity. The people in the grandstand got up and started applauding before I had even rounded first base. When I came in to home plate, my team stood there waiting for me and cheering as if this were the last game of the World Series and I had saved the day. Pure glory.

We still lost ten to one, but in the car riding home afterward, I was a hundred percent hero and no one could take that away from me, ever.

My parents chattered on about how great it had been, while I sat in the back seat basking in fresh memories and their praise. As we turned the corner of Main Street and Broadway, my father said with a loving chuckle, “And did you know your fly was open the whole way round?”

“What?”

“Your fly was down.”

“Oh, Stan, you said you weren’t going to tell him that.” Mom shook her head and smiled sympathetically at me over her shoulder.

In poleaxed, stunned-still shock, I looked down at my blue jeans. I’d hit a home run in these pants. They were part of the legend’s uniform! But there it was—the accusing white slip of my underpants beaming out through my fly. Not much. Not enough to really be seen unless you looked hard or someone drew your attention to it, but there nevertheless. The apex of my life—and my zipper was open!

I honestly don’t remember if I got over it quickly or if that moment’s brain-blasting embarrassment lasted a long time. Until I told the story to Lily, it had been a fond smile from way in my past, the kind of childhood memory you like to tell your partner so they can share a piece of your past few others know. I finished telling her the story with a smile and a shrug. “Max hits a homer.”

“That’s despicable. Your father is a real asshole sometimes.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why’d he tell you that? What was the point? You had your home run. It was yours, nothing could take it away from you. But he did—he spoiled it forever by telling you about your zipper. Listen to the way you tell it now—like it’s only a funny little amusing story. Right? ‘Max hits a homer.’ You should have heard your voice. It wasn’t only that, it was one of the supreme moments of your childhood. A home run! So what if your stupid zipper was down? So what if the whole world knew, so long as you didn’t? He’s an insensitive jerk.”

Call me blind. Or only in love with my father, whatever, I never thought of it like that. I knew the man loved me and wasn’t trying to ruin my moment. But like a hammer thrown across four decades, the wrongness of what he did hit me square in the head for the first time.

Looking down from the airplane at the empty, lit baseball stadium, I remembered my wife’s indignant voice as she spoke of him.

How many times had we done exactly the same thing with Lincoln? Was that what caused him to turn out so disastrously? Were there hundreds or thousands of things we’d done out of pure love that were nonetheless so flat-out wrong an enemy couldn’t have devised a more effective means of destroying our boy?

This is what I thought about while crossing America that night. Pity the man who is not sure of his sins. Beware of the child who is his responsibility.

Halfway through the trip, I thought if only I could stay up here in the air for the rest of my life. As in a children’s story, it would have made things so much simpler: Once upon a time there was a man who had made so many mistakes in his life that he decided to leave the earth and never return.

It was raining in New York when we landed. Water rolled down the windows in strange patterns as we taxied to the gate. Since it was such a late flight, there wasn’t the usual rush of passengers to leave their seats and then the plane itself. People rose slowly and shuffled forward to the exits like tired zombies.