The Eighth Inning

The goldfish had been dead three days before I noticed.

That's the kind of man I'd become—someone who could watch life deteriorate in a glass bowl on his kitchen counter and miss it entirely. Sarah noticed everything. She noticed the cat's water bowl was empty, noticed I stopped reading, noticed the way I'd started sleeping on the couch because our bedroom felt like a crime scene I couldn't enter anymore.

"You're not here," she'd said the night she left. "You're somewhere else. And I can't live with a ghost."

The game on TV droned on—bottom of the eighth, two runners on. I'd played baseball in college, shortstop, before I blew out my knee and became a man who sold insurance and watched other men live the life I'd planned. Mark, my son, had played too. Third base. He'd had the arm for it, the quickness. But he was twenty-four now, living in Chicago, and we hadn't spoken since Thanksgiving.

The cat—a scrawny tabby named Cooper that Sarah had rescued from a shelter years ago—jumped onto the coffee table and stared at me.

"What?" I said. "You want dinner? You want attention? You want me to be something I'm not?"

Cooper just watched me with those yellow eyes, and I realized I was talking to a cat about my marital failures.

I stood up, my knees popping, and walked to the kitchen. The goldfish floated at the top of the bowl, its orange scales dulling in the filtered light. Sarah had won it for me at a carnival the summer we started dating. "A metaphor," she'd whispered, pressing the plastic bag into my hands. "Fragile. Beautiful. Easy to kill if you're not paying attention."

Fourteen years later, she'd been right about everything.

I flushed the fish down the toilet, then stood in the bathroom staring at myself in the mirror. The man there looked like someone I used to know.

On my way back to the couch, my phone buzzed. Mark.

"Dad," he said. "I'm getting married."

"Oh," I said. "That's—that's wonderful, son."

"Her name is Elena. She's a nurse. We want you to come. In June. In Chicago."

I looked around the empty apartment. At the television showing the baseball game I wasn't watching. At the cat watching me with something like judgment.

"I'll be there," I said.

"Dad?" Mark's voice cracked. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I lied, like I'd been lying for months. "Just watching the game."

"You always loved baseball," he said, and the memory in his voice nearly broke me.

After I hung up, Cooper jumped onto the couch and pressed himself against my leg. I buried my hand in his fur, feeling the steady rhythm of his heart, and for the first time in months, I didn't feel completely alone in the apartment.

The game went into extra innings. I stayed up and watched every pitch.