He was standing on a baseball field with a chain-link backstop behind him and a hill behind that. He was wearing a uniform, a real one, with a patch on the sleeve and a ball cap pushed back on his head, and he was holding a bat over his shoulder like it was heavy and he was proud of it being heavy. He was skinny. He had big ears. His hair stuck up at the crown in a whorl, a cowlick that the cap had not managed to flatten. He was squinting, one eye more than the other, and grinning with one side of his mouth.
Carter knew that grin. He saw it every morning in the bathroom mirror when he was trying to make his hair lie down. He knew that cowlick. His mother called it his tornado. He knew those ears, which his friend Danny Ruiz said could pick up KTKT without a radio.
It was him.
It was not him. The uniform was wrong, and the picture was old, black and white, with those wavy edges, and the backstop and the hill were nowhere he had ever been. But it was his face. It was so much his face that the back of his neck went cold under the wet T-shirt, and he heard himself say, stupidly, "That's not me."
"No," the old woman said. "It isn't." Her voice was shaking. She turned the photograph over, and her hand was shaking too, and he read the pencil on the back.
Carter. Age 11. Warren Ballpark. June 1956.
"That," she said, "is my son."
* * *
Her name was Evelyn Abbott. She told him that after a while, after she had put the baseball photograph back in the box and taken it out again twice, after she had pressed the handkerchief against her mouth and said, "I'm sorry, I'm being a foolish old woman," and he had said, "No you're not," because what else were you supposed to say.
"Your last name," she said. "What is it?"
"Lowell."
He watched it land and slide off. Something in her shoulders dropped.
"Lowell," she repeated. "And your father. What's his name?"
"Ray. Raymond."
"Raymond Lowell." She said it slowly, testing it, the way you'd test a step you weren't sure would hold. "Where's he from, your daddy? Is he from Tucson?"