Seventh Inning Papaya

The papaya sat between us on the aluminum bench, ripe and alien in the cool September air. Martin had brought it, wrapped in a checkered napkin like some kind of peace offering. Or maybe an accusation.

"Your wife called," he said, not looking at the field where the baseball game was unfolding in slow motion. "She thinks you're at a conference."

I nodded, picking at the fruit's yellow-orange flesh with plastic fork tines. The texture was wrong—too soft, too yielding. Like everything else in my life lately.

"Are you going to tell her?" Martin asked. His voice was careful, measured. He'd been my friend since college, since before the mortgage and the promotion and the wife who didn't ask questions because she didn't want to hear answers.

"Tell her what?" I said. "That I skipped a dental conference to sit in the cheap seats with her husband's best friend, eating tropical fruit and watching minor league baseball?"

Martin flinched. Good.

The umpire called a strike. The crowd roared, a wave of sound that washed over us without touching the air between our bodies. I could feel him there—his elbow three inches from mine, the warmth radiating off him, the way he'd stopped watching the game entirely.

"This papaya's going to rot," he said.

"Everything rots, Martin."

He turned to me then, really looked at me, with eyes that held fifteen years of knowing everything and saying nothing. "Some things ripen first."

The words hung there, heavier than the humidity, more dangerous than any curveball. I thought about his wife—my wife—about the way they'd laughed together at last year's Christmas party, the inside jokes, the shared glances. About the papaya Martin had bought three weeks ago when I mentioned, in passing, that I'd never had one.

He'd remembered. She wouldn't have remembered.

"I'm tired of pretending," I whispered, and the confession tasted like the fruit—sweet, strange, inevitable.

Martin's hand found mine beneath the napkin, his palm warm and calloused from years of gripping tools, of holding things together. The baseball game continued around us, irrelevant and eternal.

"We don't have to pretend anymore," he said, and somehow that was both a promise and a beginning.