Supporting cast · The Good Father
Eight. David and Sarah’s son. The one who still believed, who does his homework in careful columns the way his father does math, and who looks to the bench to see if his dad is watching.
Cooper is eight, a third-grader who plays travel-league baseball at the field beside Harmon High, where his father coaches third base on Saturday mornings. He chokes up two inches on a bat that is still too long for him, because the right size is not in the budget, and swings with his whole body. He does his homework in careful columns, the belief that if the numbers are right the answer will follow, the same faith his father keeps and the same faith the book quietly breaks.
Cooper is the one who still believes, in his father, in the system, in the order of things. He steps on the creaky hallway floorboard on purpose every night because the creak is the game. When he strikes out, what lifts the weight is not a brilliant thing David says but the proof that his father was watching, the hit and the miss, the specificity that is love. The whole of David’s gambling is, in his own telling, in service of keeping exactly this: the boy at first base, looking back to see if Dad is in the stands.
Cooper is the family member the collapse is hidden from longest and explained to least. The travel-ball registration ($225, due October 1) is one of the bills in the drawer; the bat that is too long is the small daily arithmetic of a household with no margin. When the house goes and Sarah takes the children to the East Side, Cooper goes with his mother, the believer carried out of the house his father bet away. In the book’s ledger he is the clearest statement of the stakes: the good life Helen begged David to simply have, embodied in a boy who painted Saturn’s rings with a toothbrush and made the travel team.