The Cable Guy's Last Inning

The bear of a man sat on my couch, his work boots still on, eating my cereal directly from the box. This was the third cable company technician this month, and I was too exhausted to ask him to stop. My husband had left six weeks ago, taking the good coffee maker and his baseball card collection, leaving behind only his zombie-eyed stare in every photograph on the mantle.

"You know," the cable guy said between spoonfuls of raisin bran, "I used to play. College scholarship, third base. Arm like a fucking cannon." He flexed, and the flannel shirt strained against shoulders that had once been powerful, now softened by years of hanging from poles and crawling through crawl spaces.

I nodded, not really listening. The television flickered to life—static, then color, then my own hollow face reflected back at me. Since Mark left, I'd been operating on autopilot, a zombie moving through the motions of a life I no longer recognized. My friends said I was handling it well. They didn't know about the nights I sat in the parked car in the garage, engine off, wondering how long it would take for the carbon monoxide to make me feel something again.

"There," the technician said, pointing the remote at the screen. "Game's on. Yankees versus Boston."

We watched in silence as some young man, not much older than Mark had been when we met, hit a home run. The crowd roared. The bear of a man beside me cheered, and in that moment, I saw the ghost of who he might have been, just as I saw the ghost of who I might have become.

"You okay, ma'am?" he asked, and the gentleness in his voice nearly broke me.

"No," I said, the truth spilling out like water through a dam. "But I think I will be."

He nodded, packed up his tools, and left me there with the baseball game flickering across the screen, the first real thing I'd felt in weeks. Outside, the world kept turning, indifferent to my small tragedy. But the cable worked, and sometimes, that's enough.