Seventh Inning Stretch

The seat next to her remained empty, just as it had for the past three months. Mara peeled the orange slowly, letting the citrus spray mist against her cheeks, the sharp scent cutting through the stale beer and popcorn air of the stadium. She shouldn't have come alone. The baseball field stretched green and perfect below, players moving like clockwork dolls in their white uniforms.

"He's not coming back, you know," said the older woman beside her, gesturing with a foam finger. Mara had explained her story somewhere around the third inning—something about transfer requests and corporate restructuring and promises made in bed at 2 AM.

The scoreboard flashed: BULLS 3, CROWS 1. His team. Their team.

"I know," Mara said. She watched number 24 adjust his cap, spit on the ground. "He took the promotion in Chicago. Said it was the opportunity of a lifetime."

The woman snorted. "Men always think they can ride the bull forever. They forget the ground's eventually going to come up at them."

A foul ball arced toward their section. The crowd surged upward, hands reaching, collective breath held. Mara watched the white sphere against the darkening sky, thinking how small it looked—this thing that could change a game, a career, a life with one improbable trajectory.

The ball dropped three rows down. Disappointment rippled through the seats around them.

"My husband left me for his secretary," the woman continued, as if they'd been talking for years. "Twenty-three years down the drain. She's twenty-three, by the way. He actually thought that was funny."

Mara laughed despite herself. She'd forgotten how strangers at sporting events could become temporary confessors, how the noise of the crowd created pockets of intimate silence.

"I think I'm relieved," Mara admitted. "About David. I was planning the wedding before he'd even asked. I wanted the bull, the horns, the whole charging package. Maybe I just wanted what I thought I should want."

The sun dipped below the stadium rim. She ate another section of orange, juice running down her fingers, sticky and sweet. The scoreboard changed: BULLS 3, CROWS 4. The crowd roared.

"Life's funny that way," the woman said, standing up for the seventh inning stretch. "You think you're watching one game, but you're really playing another."

Mara stood too. She raised her sticky orange-stained hands toward the sky, toward the floodlights coming alive, toward the improbable perfect arc of this particular moment, and finally, she sang.