Cable to Yesterday

The baseball card sat on my nightstand, edges curling like dead leaves. 1972, the year my father stopped being my father and became just another man who'd left. I'd been holding onto it for thirty years, waiting for the right moment to throw it away, or maybe forgive him. Probably throw it away.

Maya rolled over, her back to me, the morning light cutting across her shoulder blades like a promise I'd stopped keeping. The vitamin bottle on her nightstand—prenatal vitamins, still full—caught the light. Three months of trying. Three months of her tracking cycles, of me timing it perfectly, of both of us pretending we weren't keeping score.

"I have to go," she whispered.

"I know."

"The cable guy is coming between nine and one."

"I'll be here."

She didn't ask what I'd be here doing. She didn't ask anything anymore.

The cable had been out since Tuesday. No internet, no television, just the three of us in this apartment that had suddenly become too quiet. Maya said she needed the distraction. I told her I needed the silence. Both of us were lying.

I got up after she left, made coffee that tasted like burnt hope, and sat on the couch holding the baseball card. The player was nobody famous. Just some minor leaguer who'd never made it to the majors. My father had given it to me the day he walked out, said something about how sometimes you strike out, and that's just how the game works.

The cable guy arrived at noon. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with eyes that had seen too many apartments like mine.

"Bad connection," he said, twisting a wire behind the TV. "You'd be surprised how many marriages end over bad wiring."

"Is that a fact?"

"Or maybe marriages end and then the wiring goes bad. Hard to say which is cause, which is effect."

He worked in silence for a while, then: "You know what they call it when a player goes up to bat and doesn't swing?"

"Being patient?"

"Walking. Sometimes the best thing you can do is let it come to you."

He finished, packed up his tools, and left me with a working connection I didn't want anymore.

I threw the baseball card in the trash. Then I fished it out and put it in my pocket.

Maya came home at six. I'd made dinner. I'd bought flowers. I'd taken my vitamins—real ones this time, the ones the doctor said might help with stress.

"The cable's working," she said.

"Yeah."

"Good."

"Maya?"

She looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in weeks.

"Let's not swing today," I said. "Let's just walk."

She didn't smile, but she sat down at the table. And for the first time in months, I felt like maybe we were playing the same game again.