The Fruit of Forgotten Summers

The papaya sat on the counter, its mottled yellow-orange skin like a bruise she couldn't stop pressing. Six dollars seventy-nine at Whole Foods—ridiculous, really—but she'd been desperate for something that tasted like the Caribbean vacation they'd never taken. The one they'd been planning for five years, ever since the mortgage was approved and the promotion came through and life started its slow expansion to fill every available crevice of their days.

Mark was in the living room watching baseball. The announcer's voice drifted through the hallway, that familiar cadence of strikeouts and sacrifice flies that had lulled him through Sunday afternoons since before she'd known him. She could picture him exactly: slumped in the leather armchair, one hand dangling off the side, the other cradling a beer he'd forget to finish.

In the bathroom, the faucet wouldn't stop dripping. It had started three mornings ago—a single, determined plink of water hitting porcelain, first thing after Mark left for work, as if the house itself were counting down the hours until he returned. She'd meant to call the plumber. She'd meant to do a lot of things.

Their son's goldfish, Bubbles, floated near the top of the bowl, its orange scales dulling by degrees. Four years old and somehow still alive despite every indication that it should have given up. Connor had won it at a carnival, that summer before everything changed. Now Connor was at college, and Bubbles continued its lazy circuits of the glass prison, a memory made flesh and stubbornly refusing to die.

She sliced the papaya. It yielded too easily, soft as regret, revealing black seeds that scattered across the cutting board like dropped thoughts. The first bite was cloying, musky and somehow sad. This wasn't what papayas were supposed to taste like. This wasn't what anything was supposed to taste like.

In the living room, the crowd erupted. Mark shouted something unintelligible. She took another bite, then another, forcing the exotic sweetness down her throat, standing in her silent kitchen with its persistent drip and its dying fish and its fruit that tasted like a lie they'd both been telling for so long they'd started to believe it was true.

She would finish the papaya. She would call the plumber. She would flush Bubbles when he finally went—maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. And she would walk into the living room and sit beside Mark and ask who was winning, and she would pretend to care about the answer, because that's what you did when the alternative was admitting that the game had ended long ago, and somehow, neither of you had noticed.