The Goldfish at Fenway

Margot swallowed the vitamin D supplement with lukewarm coffee, the pill catching in her throat like a secret she'd been meaning to tell herself. Forty-seven years old and still forgetting that her body needed help now—help that David used to provide in the form of surprise weekend getaways, neck kisses while she cooked, and the way he'd grab her hand across the dinner table.

Now he grabbed his phone.

"Did you feed the goldfish?" he asked, not looking up from his screen.

"This morning."

"Good." He tapped something out, smiled faintly. "Good that you remembered."

The goldfish—origami, folded from iridescent orange paper—swam in a ceramic bowl on their windowsill. David had made it during his midlife crisis pottery class, the one he'd taken three years ago when the architecture firm laid him off. He'd folded two hundred paper fish since then. Each one marked something: an argument, an apology, a night he stayed out too long.

There were seven fish in the bowl now.

"I'm meeting the guys for the game tonight," David said, finally meeting her eyes. "Red Sox against the Yankees."

"You hate baseball."

"I'm trying to reconnect." He stood up, kissed her forehead—dutiful, automatic. "It's just something men do, Margot. Be like a bear. In the wild."

"Bears don't go to baseball games."

"You know what I mean." He grabbed his jacket. "Anyway, it's corporate seats. Guy from work knows a guy."

The guy from work was Sheila. Margot had seen the texts—innuendo disguised as networking, lunch meetings that lasted three hours, a text sent at 2 AM that just said "up?" David had deleted it, but not before Margot's thumb had accidentally opened the notification.

She should say something. She should be the bear he wanted—ferocious, territorial, unwilling to share her territory. Instead she felt like something smaller, something contained in glass, swimming in circles.

"David?"

"Yeah?" Hand on the doorknob.

"The vitamins. You stopped taking yours."

"What?"

"Your vitamins. You stopped taking them six months ago. Is there someone else?" The question escaped before she could cage it.

Silence stretched like a tarp over a construction site. Finally, slowly, he turned back to her.

"What do you want me to say, Margot?"

"I want you to fold me a fish."

He stared at her, and for a moment she saw something break behind his eyes—regret, exhaustion, the terrible weight of a choice made in increments, none of which seemed fatal at the time.

"I can't," he said softly. "I ran out of orange paper months ago."

The door closed behind him. Margot looked at the ceramic bowl, at the seven paper fish swimming in still water. She'd always hated the color orange.