Gene Pavlik pitched six seasons in the minor leagues and never got a day in the big ones. He threw a knuckleball. He told people that was why, and it was partly true. A knuckleball, he said, is a pitch nobody trusts, not the batter, not the catcher, not the manager, and on most days not the man who throws it.

After baseball he sold insurance in Racine, and he was good at it, because he could stand on a stranger's porch for a long time without getting nervous. He married, and they had a daughter, Nora, and when Nora was eleven she came home from her first Little League practice and said she wanted to pitch.

"Girls don't pitch," said her mother, who was not against it, only surprised.

"I'm going to," Nora said. "The coach said anybody who can throw strikes can pitch. I can throw strikes." She looked at her father. "Mostly."

Gene went out to the garage and found his old glove in a box under the Christmas lights, stiff as a board, and he oiled it that night at the kitchen table while Nora watched. The next evening they went out in the backyard.

She had a good arm. She threw hard and straight and he could see right away where it would go wrong: the boys in her league would catch up to hard and straight by the time she was thirteen. He didn't say that. Instead, after a week, he held a ball up in front of her face and dug the nails of two fingers in just behind the seams.

"This one," he said, "you don't throw. You push it. Stiff wrist. Like you're closing a door you don't want to slam. And you let go with nothing. No spin at all."

"Why no spin?"

"Because when a ball doesn't spin, the air doesn't know what to do with it. And if the air doesn't know, the batter sure doesn't."

Her first hundred went straight into the dirt. The next hundred spun like tops, lazy and fat, and he said nothing, just threw them back. Her fingernails split. She cried once, from frustration, and then got mad at herself for crying, and threw another one. It was late July before the first real one left her hand. It came in slow as a soap bubble, rolled left, rolled right, and dropped like somebody had cut its string, and Gene, who had caught knuckleballs from better pitchers for years, missed it entirely. It hit him in the knee.

He sat down in the grass. Nora ran in, scared. He was laughing so hard he couldn't talk.

She pitched in a real game for the first time in August, in the fourth inning of a game her team was losing by six. Gene stood behind the backstop with his hands in his pockets, the way he'd seen his own father stand, because if he took them out he didn't know what they'd do. The first batter was a big kid with a mustache already, the kind of twelve-year-old who shaves. Nora threw him two fastballs and he fouled both of them back over the fence into the parking lot.

Then she looked in at her father. He didn't nod. He didn't have to.

The pitch came in like a moth. The big kid watched it come and started his swing and changed his mind and changed it back, and it ducked under his bat, and it ducked under the catcher's mitt too, and rolled all the way to the backstop and stopped at Gene's feet, and the umpire, a retired plumber named Hoff who had been umpiring Little League since Gene played in it, said, "Strike three," in a voice full of wonder.

The runner on third came home on the passed ball. They lost by seven.

In the car, Nora was quiet a long time. Then she said, "It fooled our own catcher."

"That's the pitch," Gene said. "It fools everybody. Even the people on your side. Even you."

"Then why throw it?"

He thought about six seasons of bus rides and motel rooms and managers who looked at him like he was a card trick. He thought about the ball in the grass at his feet, and old Hoff's voice.

"Because once in a while," he said, "it's the most beautiful thing in the world. And you're the only one who can make it."

She pitched through high school. She never did learn to trust it. Neither did he. They kept throwing it anyway, the two of them, in the backyard, in the long summer evenings, until the light went, and they couldn't see where it would land, and it didn't matter.