Chlorine and Regret

The cable guy had left three hours ago, but the television still hummed with that new-installation static, the way everything hums in a rented beach house—uncertain, temporary, like the marriage itself.

Mark sat on the leather sofa watching a baseball game from 1998, some ESPN Classic replay he'd already seen twice. The vitamin D supplement sat on the coffee table next to his whiskey, a daily reminder from his wife that his bones were aging faster than their love.

"You're missing it," Elena called from the pool deck. "The sunset's incredible."

"In a minute," he said, not turning away from the screen.

The baseball players moved in grainy slow motion, swinging at pitches already thrown decades ago. Mark thought about how his entire adult life had felt like that—swinging late, always arriving just after everything important had already happened. The promotion. The kids growing up. Elena's happiness.

He'd married her thinking love was something you could maintain like a car, but somewhere along the way he'd forgotten to schedule the tune-ups. Now she sat by the pool in her expensive swimsuit, taking vitamins and reading novels about passionate affairs, while he sat inside watching other men play a boy's game on a screen.

The irony wasn't lost on him. He'd worked sixty-hour weeks for twenty years to afford vacations like this, only to spend them pretending everything was fine. The pool shimmered blue and inviting through the sliding glass door, but Mark couldn't remember the last time he'd felt like swimming in anything.

Elena came inside, smelling of chlorine and expensive sunscreen. She picked up her vitamin bottle and shook two capsules into her palm.

"Mark?" she said softly. "The cable's working fine. You can turn it off now."

He looked at her really looked at her, for the first time in what might have been years. Something in her expression suggested she wasn't talking about the television at all.

"Yeah," he said, reaching for the remote. "Yeah, I think I can."