Extra Innings

Margaret found the baseball in the back of his closet three weeks after the funeral, wrapped in a faded orange t-shirt from a spring training game they'd attended in 1998. The leather was cracked, the laces brittle with age. She hadn't thought about baseball in years—Frank had stopped watching when his eyes started going, and she'd never really understood the appeal anyway. Nine men standing around in a field, waiting.

The orange cat, Barnaby, wound around her ankles, purring like a small engine. He'd been Frank's cat, exclusively Frank's, sleeping at the foot of his bed for twelve years. Now he followed Margaret from room to room, his orange fur bright against the gray carpet, as if demanding she notice him. As if demanding she notice anything at all.

She sat on the floor of the closet, baseball in hand, and suddenly she was twenty-three again, sitting in the bleachers with Frank, cheap beer warming in the cupholder, the sun dipping below the stadium rim. He'd explained the rules to her, his face animated in that way she'd loved, the way that made everything seem possible. She'd pretended to care about the curveballs and the RBI's because she'd already decided she was going to marry him, and sometimes you had to pretend to love the things your heart couldn't help but choose.

Barnaby butted his head against her knee, hard enough to leave a bruise. She looked down at his orange coat, the same vibrant improbable shade as the sunset that evening at the ballpark, and realized she couldn't remember the last thing she'd said to Frank that mattered. The last thing that wasn't about medication or appointment times or what to do with the house.

"I never learned the infield fly rule," she said to the empty room. Barnaby meowed, demanding dinner, and Margaret realized with a jolt that grief wasn't a wave that eventually receded. It was extra innings—a game that kept going long after you thought it would end, with runners on base and two outs, and you standing at the plate, bat in hand, forced to take another swing even when your arms were too tired to lift them.