Papaya Season

The papaya sat on the counter for three days before you finally admitted you'd bought it by mistake. You'd meant to pick up a mango, something familiar and safe, but in the fluorescent haze of the grocery store at 11 PM after your mother's funeral, your hands had acted on autopilot.

Now it sat between us, overripe and weeping onto the cutting board, its mottled skin resembling nothing so much as a bruise that won't heal.

"Your father loved papaya," you said, knife hovering over the fruit. "Grew it in the backyard until the frost killed everything."

I didn't tell you that I already knew this. That I'd sat with him in that garden three months ago, while you were at work, while he told me about the affair he'd had the year you were born. About how the papaya tree had been his apology to your mother, his attempt at growing something new from rotten soil.

Barnaby, your father's aging golden retriever, stirred at my feet. He'd been sleeping more since the funeral, as if the house itself had grown heavier without your mother's voice commanding him to sit, to stay, to be good.

"You should take him," I said instead. "He deserves better than this house."

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the kitchen's stagnant air. For a moment, everything was stark and undeniable: the papaya's orange flesh, the gray in your temples, the years of unsaid things between us that had calcified into something resembling a marriage.

"Seattle," you said, setting down the knife. "You're really going."

"My flight leaves Tuesday."

You nodded, as if you'd always known. Perhaps you had.

The papaya lay open between us, its seeds small and black, a universe of beginnings we'd never plant. I watched your hands, still beautiful after all these years, as you finally sliced through its softening heart.

"Eat," you said, sliding half onto a plate. "Before it turns completely."

We ate in the lightning's intermittent flash, the dog breathing at our feet, the papaya impossibly sweet against the taste of endings. Some things, I realized, must rot before you can finally let them go.