Seventh Inning Stretch

The baseball arced through the humid evening air, and Marcus checked his iPhone for the third time in as many minutes. Still nothing from Sarah. Not that he'd expected anything—not after three months of silence—but the old habits died harder than the relationships themselves.

He watched the batter adjust his helmet, exposing a thatch of dark hair that caught the floodlights. It was the same shade Sarah's had been before the chemotherapy, before the wigs and the scarves and the slow, terrible transformation of her into someone he loved but couldn't recognize anymore.

"You've got a short life line," she'd told him once, drunk on cheap wine and the thrill of new love, tracing the creases in his palm. "But look at this." Her finger had circled his heart line. "This is where it gets interesting."

Now the crowd roared as the ball cleared the outfield wall. Marcus's phone buzzed in his hand—not a message, but a calendar reminder. Three years ago today, their first date. The system remembered better than he did sometimes.

He thought about the baseball she'd given him after that game, signed by some minor league player whose name he'd already forgotten. It sat on a shelf in his apartment next to her old hair clips and the framed photograph of them at the beach, both of them squinting against the sun, neither one knowing that in six months she'd find a lump, or that in two years she'd tell him she couldn't do this anymore, couldn't make him watch her die piece by piece.

The seventh inning stretch music began. Marcus stood with the rest of the crowd, stretched his arms overhead. His palm was sweating against the phone's smooth glass. He opened the messages app, typed three words, deleted them. Typed them again.

Then he noticed something he'd missed earlier: a message from her sister, sent that morning. "She's asking for you."

Marcus sat back down as the cheering subsided, the game continuing around him, suddenly both more and less important than it had been five minutes ago. He pressed the phone to his palm, feeling its warmth, feeling the weight of three years' worth of unsaid things, and began to type something different this time.