It was time to choose and his mother took him to the Curve Inn. She let him put quarters in the jukebox and he played Cats in the Cradle, Detroit Rock City, The Streak. She drank ginger ale. Her hands shook. She looked at the bar, back at him, sipped the ginger ale, watched him eat his cheeseburger, cheese fries. He imagined her hand wrapped around the Wheat Germ in her purse, ready to sprinkle it everywhere if he took his eyes off her so he didn’t.

“So your father—” She swallowed a burp but it still came up. Like a fish making a ring on the surface, sucking something down.

“I know, Mom,” he said. If he closed his eyes, he saw his father in black and white, like old pictures. He held a walking stick even though he wasn’t crippled or limped. The manes of lions curled around the top of it.

“Oh honey. You don’t.” She looked around the empty booths of the Curve Inn. She had as many freckles as the sky had stars. He once tried to count them, stopped at 517. “I thought I’d be the one, you know.”

To be the one. Yes. That would be something. In 1966, when he was born, Hank Aaron hit 44 homeruns and his father told him that right then and there he knew then what lay ahead for Hank. By the time Hank Aaron retired, on Aaron’s birthday, Hank Aaron had 755.  And almost 1400 strikeouts. But who remembered those? Aaron thought only of those times Hank rounded the bases and trotted home.

“You should’ve seen me,” his father often said. He held the walking stick like a bat. “All those scouts. If only—” Aaron knew what came after that stop in this father’s swing. Him. He came.

Aaron and his mother finished, stepped outside, October. Almost Halloween. He’d wear his football uniform. Pretend to be a football player, as he did for his father, this game of dress up that now and then got his father’s attention. Aaron looked at the miniature golf course, in its last week of the season the sign said.

“Any hole,” he said to his mother. “Winner gets his wish. Okay.”

She wrinkled her face, dug her thumbs into her eyes. “Okay, Aaron.” She looked past him. He saw them too, the frayed flags hanging there. “Forlorn,” his mother said. She pointed to the nearest hole. “That one.” Hole ten.

While she paid the guy, Aaron looked over the hole. After a few yards, it split into two, with the right half a rock with a drain pipe through it that dropped the ball right atop the hole: the other was an obstacle-free winding curve that threw the ball around the edge of the course, where only a strange bounce would get the ball close.

It was his mother, not his father, who took him to baseball and football practices, every one, bought him cups and mouth guards. No Swedish fish, hot dogs, Mr. Pibb’s in the snack bar afterwards; she packed him a tuna sandwich, carrot sticks, a bag of Life cereal. And so it went.

Now and then, though, his father made it to the games. Then there’d be a feast awaiting him afterwards: two, three, sometimes four chocolate Chief Crunchies. During the games, his father’d stand on the last bleacher, yell his name. Then it was something. Those days.

His mother would take the winding path, pray for the bounce or not even think of it. Aaron thought he’d take the drainpipe in the rock. Even if it bounced off the rock, bounced back to him, he’d try it again.

He’d wish, of course, for a father.

His mother handed him the blue ball and put her yellow ball on the ground. The ball circled the course and hit no lucky bounce and spun past the hole and around the far edge, miles away. Aaron set his ball down, stood over it, looked at the rock, the winding curve.

“A lot riding on this hole,” she said. She winked at him. ‘You know I met your father miniature golfing.” Yes, he knew. At Avalon beach. “A game, isn’t it? Your father’s love.”

If only someone could explain to Aaron about his father’s love, how it started as nothing but the more he wasn’t around Aaron, the more it built and built until it exploded in a great burst of Chocolate Crunchies and that loud bellow from the bleachers.  If only Aaron understood then how much love there’d be in the world for him if he could play that game.

“It’s your father who’s the gambler,” his mother said. “What do I know about it?”

Or if someone explained to him his mother, how she thought nothing in the world could prevent her losing him, that if she forced her son to live with her she’d never be forgiven, and he’d be another lost thing, like girlhood and desire.

Aaron aimed for the rock.

If only he had known that he needed to wish for a mother to find his father’s love in this world.