Sunday's Storm

The papaya sat between us like a small, unexploded grenade. Its mottled yellow skin caught the gray light from the window — Sarah had brought it, as she always did, though neither of us particularly liked it.

'Your hair,' she said, not looking at me. 'You cut it.'

I self-consciously touched the jagged ends above my shoulders. 'Last week. It was time.'

What I didn't say: I'd cut it the morning after you moved out. I'd stood in front of the bathroom mirror and watched eleven years fall away in clumps, crying in that ugly, open-mouthed way you never let anyone see.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky in two. The papaya rattled on the table.

'Remember that storm in Provincetown?' Sarah asked. Her voice had that careful quality, like she was stepping on something fragile.

'When we stole that fisherman's hat.'

She finally looked at me, and there it was — the familiar warmth fighting against everything that had happened between us. The friend before the affair. The laughter before the betrayal.

'That hat looked ridiculous on you.'

'It looked worse on the fisherman when we finally gave it back.'

The silence stretched, comfortable and terrible all at once. We were two people who had loved each other in the wrong order, at the wrong time, in the wrong way. And now we were sitting here on a Sunday morning, eating fruit we didn't even like, pretending we could go back to before.

Before the hotel room. Before the wrecked marriages. Before the words we couldn't take back.

Lightning flashed again, closer this time. The air tasted like rain and something else — endings, maybe. Or the terrible, sweet weight of memory.

Sarah reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. Her skin was warm, her thumb finding the familiar spot on my wrist where my pulse always beat too fast when she was near.

'I miss my friend,' she said softly.

I squeezed her hand, once, and let go.

'Me too.'

The papaya sat between us, innocent and impossible. Some things you can't cut away, not even with scissors. They grow back differently, or they don't grow back at all. You just learn to live with the shape of what's missing.