Extra Innings

The orange slices sat sweating on the bench beside me, their citrus scent cutting through the humid July air. Seven years ago, Sarah would have packed them herself — precisely quartered, seeds removed, arranged in the Tupperware she'd labeled with my name in her careful cursive.

Now, I bought them at the concession stand.

"Dad! You watching?" Ethan yelled from the pitcher's mound, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He looked so much like her at that age — the same determined set of the jaw, the same way sunlight caught through his hair like spun sugar.

I held up my phone, recording his windup. The screen showed a man I barely recognized: hollow-cheeked, eyes haunted by three years of sleepless nights, going through the motions of parenthood like some corporate zombie who'd forgotten how to clock out. After Sarah's aneurysm, I'd become expert at performing normalcy. The baseball games, the parent-teacher conferences, the Sunday pancakes — all executed with the precision of someone working entirely off muscle memory.

Ethan threw a strike. The batter swung and missed.

"Nice one!" I called out, my voice cracking slightly. I checked the iPhone again — no missed calls, no emergencies. Just the relentless forward march of time displayed in glowing digits.

The other parents sat in clusters around me, their laughter overlapping like overlapping radio frequencies. I'd tried, early on, to insert myself into their conversations about property taxes and travel soccer. But grief had made me strange company, a walking reminder of everything that could go wrong. Now I brought a book and sat alone, a ghost haunting his own life.

Ethan struck out the next batter. As he walked off the field, he veered toward my bench instead of the dugout.

"Did you see my curveball?" he asked, breathless and sweat-slicked, grabbing an orange slice. Juice dripped down his chin, and for a second, Sarah was sitting there too, leaning in to wipe it away with her thumb.

"I saw it," I said, and my throat tightened. "Your mom would've been proud."

He nodded, swallowing the orange, then threw his arms around my neck — sudden, fierce, the way he used to when he was small enough to carry. My phone buzzed in my pocket, ignored.

"I still miss her," he whispered into my shoulder.

"Me too, bud." And for the first time in three years, the words didn't feel like an admission of defeat.

The zombie didn't die that day, but maybe he started waking up. One orange slice at a time.