Rain Delay

The stadium lights flickered against the bruised-purple sky, and from our seats behind home plate, Elena's blond hair plastered itself across her face in wet ribbons. We'd spent three hundred dollars on these tickets—my promotion bonus, she'd called it when she bought them—but now the game was stalled. Rain delay.

She shook her head, droplets flying like sparks, and that's when I saw it: a patchy, quarter-sized circle of scalp near her crown. The chemotherapy was taking more than the doctors had promised. More than she'd told me.

"You should have said something," I heard myself say over the hollow drumming of rain on the stadium roof. "I would have—"

"What? Held my hand?" She turned to me, and her eyes were flat and furious. "Like you held my hand when I told you I was starting treatment? You were busy, Marcus. You were ALWAYS busy." Her voice cracked, and something inside me cracked with it. "This baseball game was supposed to be us trying again. But you're still not here."

A little boy two rows down wore a oversized jersey, his father's arm draped heavy around his small shoulders. The boy pointed at something on the field—maybe a groundskeeper rushing to cover the mound with a tarp—and I thought of my own father, dead seven years now. How he'd taken me to games like this. How he'd taught me to throw a baseball before he could teach me how to love someone without reservation. That inheritance had arrived late, or perhaps not at all.

The rain kept falling. That endless, indifferent water.

I reached for Elena's hand across the armrest, and for a terrible second, she pulled away. Then her fingers tangled with mine, cold and trembling.

"It's coming out in clumps," she whispered, and that was when I understood: she wasn't angry about the rain or the wasted money. She was afraid I would stop loving her as she changed. As she became someone unrecognizable to both of us.

I squeezed her hand. "We can leave. We can go home and I'll help you—"

"No." She stood up, water streaming down her cheeks like a second set of tears. "I want to stay. I want to watch them play when the rain stops. I want to feel like we're still the kind of people who do things like this."

The tarp covered the infield like a shroud. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and somewhere beneath the stadium, somewhere in the spaces between us, something waited to either drown us or carry us forward. I stood beside her and let the water fall, neither of us moving, neither of us speaking, while the announcer's voice crackled over the PA system to tell us what we already knew: this game was suspended. Until further notice.