Summary

In “The Pitch,” a woman recalls her husband showing her a photograph he found while going through his recently deceased father's things. The photo featured two little boys in the woods (which they called “the Pitch” (69) in his Florida hometown), one front and center, the other in the background climbing a tree. When the narrator asked her husband about the tree climber, he pretended not to see him. She later saw her husband burning the photograph. She began to feel vaguely threatened by her husband and believed he must have done something to the other boy.

The narrator is a successful children's book illustrator, but she has never won her industry's most coveted prize, the Caldecott Medal. At the time of the events of the story, she was working on a book by an eccentric writer featuring animal characters held...