The Cable Guy Was Never My Friend

The cable guy took three hours to install something that should've taken thirty minutes. His name was Marcus, and I watched him work through my living room window, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, while I paced around my empty kitchen cooking spinach for one.

We'd played baseball together in high school—Marcus in right field, me at shortstop. That was twenty years and two divorces ago. Now he was threading coaxial cables through my walls while I stirred wilted greens in a pan, wondering when exactly we'd both become the kind of men who made small talk about weather and routing numbers.

"You still playing?" he asked, gesturing toward the baseball glove I kept on the shelf. It was gathering dust next to my wedding album.

"Haven't picked it up since Sarah left," I said, because admitting I hadn't played since before Sarah left would've been too pathetic. "You?"

"My kid's starting T-ball this spring," Marcus said, testing the connection. "He's got my hair, though. Poor kid's gonna be bald by twenty." He laughed, but his eyes stayed flat.

The spinach was overcooked. I scraped it into the sink anyway, watching it swirl down the drain in a green spiral that looked like something dying.

"Your cable's working," Marcus said, wiping his hands on a rag that had seen better decades. "You've got four hundred channels of nothing to watch now."

He paused at the door, looking like he wanted to say something—about the old days, about how I'd been the best man at his first wedding, about how we hadn't spoken in three years until I called about the cable installation.

"Hey," he said instead. "The league's looking for umpires. Fifty bucks a game. If you wanted to...

I watched his truck pull away from the curb, the cables inside my walls humming with something that wasn't quite connection, but wasn't quite nothing either. The spinach smell lingered in the kitchen. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear kids playing baseball, the crack of a bat carrying through the evening air like something I used to recognize.