Rainy Ninth Inning

The spinach salad sat untouched between them, its leaves already wilting in the restaurant's oppressive heat. Ellen had picked the place, of course. She always made the choices.

'You're not eating,' David said, pushing at his own uneaten food.

'I'm not hungry.' Ellen stared at the water glass in front of her, condensation dripping down the sides like slow tears. 'I never am anymore. Not with you.'

Outside, thunder rattled the windows. The baseball game had been called hours ago, but David still kept checking his phone, compulsive, desperate for any distraction from this conversation he'd been avoiding for months.

'The tickets were supposed to be tonight,' he said. 'Third row behind home plate. I paid extra.'

'You always pay extra, David. For everything. You think money fixes things.' Ellen's voice cracked. 'It doesn't fix whatever this is.' She gestured vaguely at their table, their marriage, the vast accumulating weight of twelve years.

He remembered how they'd met at a game, actually. She'd spilled water on his jersey in the seventh inning stretch. He'd laughed, bought her a beer, and somehow that had been enough to build a life on. Not enough to sustain one, apparently.

'I could sell the tickets,' he said. 'We could go somewhere. Anywhere you want.'

Ellen finally looked at him, really looked at him, and David saw it then - the same exhaustion he felt every morning waking up beside her, the same quiet resignation.

'I don't want to go anywhere with you,' she said softly. 'I haven't wanted that for a long time.' She picked up her fork, stabbed at a spinach leaf. 'This isn't about baseball tickets or restaurants or where we go on vacation. It's that I look at you and feel nothing. And you look at me and see... what, exactly? Someone who used to spill things and laugh?'

The rain started then, sudden and torrential, drowning out his response. David watched the water run down the restaurant windows, blurring the city outside, turning everything into indistinguishable shapes and colors. Something about it felt familiar. The way things could just disappear, gradually, until you couldn't tell what they'd been anymore.

'I'll get the check,' he said.

Ellen nodded once, stood up, and walked out into the rain without looking back. David watched her go, then finally took a bite of the spinach salad. It was warm and bitter, and he thought maybe this was what growing up really tasted like.