The Bottom of the Ninth

The cable box had been blinking 12:00 since the funeral. Three weeks in Mark's apartment, and I still hadn't figured out how to program the damn thing.

"You hungry?" I asked the cat, a scarred tomcat named Buster who'd been watching me with judgey eyes from the windowsill. He meowed, jumped down, and wound through my legs like he owned the place. Which he sort of did now.

I cracked open a cheap can of tuna—Mark's brand, not mine—and the apartment filled with that sharp, fishy scent. Outside, rain drummed against the windows, the storm that had been threatening all day finally breaking.

The television flickered to life. Some baseball game, Dodgers versus Giants, bottom of the ninth. The cable connection must have fixed itself during the night. I sat on Mark's beat-up leather sofa, the one he'd refused to replace despite the猫 scratches on the armrests.

Buster jumped up beside me, kneading my thigh with claws that needed trimming. I scratched behind his ears and he purred, a rumble that felt almost loud in the quiet apartment.

On screen, the Dodgers' batter stepped up. Two outs, bases loaded. The crowd noise washed over me, and suddenly I was eight years old again, sitting beside Mark at Fenway, eating overpriced hot dogs and learning to keep score.

"You see that?" Mark had said, pointing at a perfectly executed double play. "That's poetry. That's why I love this game."

I'd pretended to understand. I'd pretended to care about baseball because he did. Because he was my big brother and I wanted to be wherever he was.

The batter swung. Connected. The announcer's voice rose as the ball sailed toward the wall. Buster's ears flattened.

Home run.

The crowd erupted. I stared at the screen, feeling hollowed out, like something essential had been scooped away and left me walking around like a zombie, going through motions I couldn't remember learning.

That's when I noticed it: Mark's laptop on the coffee table, open to a document I hadn't seen before. A letter, addressed to me.

"I know you only came to games because you knew I loved them," he'd written. "I know you never cared about baseball. But that's the thing about love—you show up where it matters, even when it doesn't make sense."

Buster head-butted my hand, demanding attention. The television replayed the home run from three different angles. Outside, the rain kept falling.

"You hungry?" I asked the cat again, and this time I understood what I was really asking. "You want to stay here? With me?"

Buster purred, and for the first time since Mark died, I didn't feel like a ghost haunting my brother's life. I felt like someone who might, eventually, learn to live in his own.