Seventh Inning Stretch

The papaya sat in Maya's tote bag, growing warm in the July heat. She'd bought it on impulse at the market that morning, something about its vibrant flesh reminding her of how she used to feel—alive, capable of surprise, capable of wanting things she couldn't name.

The baseball game dragged into the seventh inning. Beside her, David's iphone lit up every three minutes with work emails, his thumb scrolling automatically, face illuminated in the familiar blue glow that had become the third presence in their marriage. He'd stopped watching the actual game innings ago. He'd stopped watching anything that wasn't a screen years ago.

"You want some?" Maya asked, lifting the papaya from her bag. It was slightly bruised now, softening at the edges.

"Not hungry," David said, not looking up. "Client crisis."

The papaya had been her grandmother's favorite. Maya remembered sitting at her kitchen table as a girl, learning to eat it with a squeeze of lime, her grandmother's arthritic hands demonstrating how to scoop the seeds. Her grandmother had died while Maya was on her honeymoon. She'd missed the funeral. David had told her not to go, had said it would disrupt their travel plans, and she'd listened. She'd been listening to him for seven years.

The sky above the stadium turned orange as the sun began to drop, that particular bruised color that meant the day was ending whether you were ready for it or not. A baseball sailed into the stands, three rows down. The crowd surged. David didn't notice.

Maya took a bite of the papaya. It was perfectly ripe, sweet and complex on her tongue. The taste hit her with such force—that particular combination of memory and present, of everything she'd allowed herself to forget—that she had to put her hand over her mouth.

"You okay?" David asked, glancing up briefly before his eyes returned to the screen.

"I'm leaving," she said.

"What?" He finally looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time in what might have been months. "What do you mean? The game's not—"

"Not the game, David. Us." She stood up, the papaya still in her hand, juice running down her wrist. "I'm done being the third person in this marriage."

He laughed, that dismissive little chuckle that had once made her feel safe, like he knew things she didn't. "You're being dramatic. Sit down. We drove here together."

She left him there with his iphone and the baseball game and the orange sky staining everything the color of endings. She didn't look back. Outside the stadium, she pulled out her own phone—something she'd been avoiding for weeks—and opened the message she'd been pretending didn't exist. The one from someone who had asked her how she was, really asked, and waited for an answer.

She took another bite of papaya. It tasted like beginning.