Fruit of the Storm

The papaya sat on the counter like an accusation. Overripe, softening at the edges, much like everything else in my marriage.

"You're doing that thing with your hair again," Elena said from the doorway. She meant the way I pulled at the curl behind my left ear when I was avoiding confrontation. She knew all my tells. She'd known them for seven years, long enough to map every insecurity like coordinates on a topographical chart.

"I'm not avoiding anything."

"You're not staying either."

Our dog, Barnaby, sensed it first—the atmospheric pressure dropping before I could. He whined from his bed, tail thumping a nervous rhythm against the floorboards. The cat, Luna, watched from the refrigerator with that particular feline disdain for human melodrama.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open. The storm we'd been predicting all day had finally arrived.

"I got the promotion," I said. "Chicago."

Her silence was worse than I'd imagined. She moved to the counter, picked up the papaya, and sliced through it with a knife that caught the kitchen's fluorescent light. The flesh inside was startlingly orange against the gray afternoon.

"Chicago," she repeated. "That's the thing about choices, isn't it? You think you're making one, but really, you made it months ago. You're just now getting around to telling me."

She held out a piece of fruit to me. Our fingers didn't touch.

"You could come," I said, though we both knew she wouldn't. Her mother was here. Her research was here. The life she'd built was here, with or without me.

"Eat," she said. "It's good. Like everything else you're about to lose."

The papaya was sweet, faintly musky, nothing at all like I expected. Another thing I'd never really noticed until it was too late. Barnaby pressed against my leg, and lightning illuminated the kitchen—momentarily bright as a surgical theater, exposing all the things we'd stopped saying to each other.

"I'll pack tomorrow," I said.

She nodded, already turning away. "Tomorrow works. Tomorrow has a way of arriving whether you're ready or not."