The Bottom of the Ninth

Ellen sat beside me on the couch, but she might as well have been in another timezone. Her eyes were glued to the cable news, flickering blue across her face, while I pretended to watch the baseball game she'd been recording all week. The Yankees were down by three runs, bottom of the ninth, and honestly, I couldn't have cared less.

"You're not even watching," she said, not looking away from the screen.

"I am."

"You're a zombie, David. You've been one for months." She finally turned to me, and the disappointment in her eyes was worse than anger would have been. "You go through the motions. You come home, you eat, you sit here. But you're not present. You're not here."

I wanted to argue, but she wasn't wrong. The marriage had died slowly, like a long season spiraling into a losing streak, and I'd stopped trying to turn it around somewhere around the All-Star break.

My phone buzzed on the coffee table — work, wanting something I couldn't give them either. I'd become that guy who lived for weekends I spent drinking alone and checking baseball scores, watching other men live lives of consequence while mine narrowed to the width of a couch cushion.

"Remember when we used to go to games?" Ellen asked quietly. "Before you got promoted? Before—"

"Before what."

"Before you started wearing your father's hat everywhere and acting like his death was something you had to carry alone instead of something we were supposed to get through together?"

I reached up and touched the brim of the faded baseball cap, something I'd been doing for three years without thinking. It sat on my head like a crown of thorns, heavy with grief I'd refused to process, refused to share.

The Yankees' batter struck out swinging. Game over. Season over. And somewhere in the silence that followed, I finally heard the truth Ellen had been telling me for months.

I took off the hat and set it on the table.

"I don't want to be a zombie anymore," I said. The words felt clumsy and inadequate, but they were the first real ones I'd spoken in a long time.

Ellen's expression softened, just slightly. "Then don't be."

Outside, summer was ending. The cable box hummed. And somewhere beneath all the accumulated grief and resignation, something like hope began the slow process of waking up.