Disconnection Order

The spinach had been in the crisper drawer for three weeks when the cable guy finally showed up.

"Ma'am, I can disconnect everything but the internet," he said, kneeling beside the entertainment unit. "You want to keep that?"

Sarah stared at the back of his head, at the gray sprinkled through his brown hair. Three weeks ago, she and Mark had been arguing about something trivial—probably money, or whose turn it was to call Mark's mother. Now Mark was gone, moved into a studio apartment across town, and their joint cable account was one more knot to untangle.

"Just the cable box," she said. "Leave the internet."

Outside, lightning fractured the sky. She counted the seconds—one, two, three—before thunder rattled the windows. April in Seattle and already the storms were rolling through.

"You married?" the cable guy asked, not looking up from his work.

Sarah almost laughed. "Divorced. Well, almost. Waiting on the paperwork."

"Sorry." He tightened something with a wrench. "My sister's going through it. Third time."

"Is she?" Sarah wandered into the kitchen. The spinach stared back at her—limp, yellowing, a week past salvaging. Like everything else in her life right now. She'd meant to cook something healthy. Mark had been talking about cholesterol, about getting older. Now he was probably eating takeout every night in his bachelor apartment, and she was here with wilted spinach and a cable guy who didn't give a damn.

Lightning again, closer this time. The power flickered.

"Almost done," he called. "Hey, you want this DVR? There's probably stuff on it."

She hadn't thought about that. Recordings of shows they'd watched together—Sunday night movies, the news while they ate dinner, that documentary about penguins they'd both fallen asleep to. A whole archive of a life that no longer existed.

"Take it," she said.

He packed up his tools. She signed the receipt without looking at it. When the door closed behind him, the apartment felt cavernous. She threw the spinach in the trash. Lightning illuminated the empty space where the cable box had been, casting strange shadows on the wall. Somewhere, Mark was probably eating spinach too—fresh, crisp spinach—in a life that didn't include her.

Sarah sat on the couch and listened to the rain.