Season's End

The gray hair at my temples had appeared during the months she was sick, appearing like frost on a windowpane overnight. I ran my fingers through it now, sitting alone on the metal bleachers where we'd first met, the baseball diamond stretching out before me like a memory trying to decide whether to fade or sharpen.

Buster, her golden retriever, rested his head on my knee. His fur had lost its sheen too, duller without her hands brushing it daily. He smelled like rain and old age.

"She loved this time of year," I said aloud, though there was no one to hear. The summer heat was breaking, that sweet spot between baseball season's urgency and football's encroaching violence. Sarah had understood the poetry of infield flies, the calculus of pitch counts. She'd kept score in a notebook filled with her neat handwriting, each game a document of something that mattered, even when it didn't.

I found myself looking for her hair tie—that bright blue elastic she'd worn since college, the one I'd bought her at a CVS during a road trip because she'd forgotten hers. It wasn't in my pocket anymore. I'd thrown it away the day after the funeral, some misguided attempt at catharsis that had only left me hollow.

The players on the field were high school kids, their movements sloppy and passionate, everything still possible. I remembered being like that, before grief became a second occupation, before every joy came taxed by the knowledge of its impermanence.

Buster stood up suddenly, ears perked. A woman walked onto the field—not Sarah, never Sarah—but she had the same stride, same careless grace. She wore a baseball cap the way Sarah had, hair pulled back in that familiar blue elastic that couldn't possibly be, that defied everything I knew about loss and probability.

The dog barked, once, sharp and joyous, and something broke open in my chest—not hope, not yet, but something like it. The morning light caught the woman's hair, and for a second, the world seemed full of second chances.