The Inventory of Leaving

You never realize how much of a life is measured in vitamin bottles until you have to pack it away. Emma stood in her mother's kitchen, surrounded by the detritus of eighty-seven years: chewable vitamin C supplements the color of radioactive tangerines, prescription bottles with child-proof caps that had defeated arthritic hands, and the papaya-scented moisturizer her mother had sworn would keep her "looking like a movie star" until the end.

The cat—a tubby tabby named Clementine who had outlived two husbands and most of Emma's childhood—wove between Emma's ankles, demanding dinner. It was the same dinner Emma had been making for three weeks since the funeral: mashed spinach mixed with tuna, the only thing Clementine would deign to eat now that her person was gone.

"You're going to be living with me now," Emma told the cat, setting down the food dish. "Hope you like my apartment better than you liked the last one."

Her phone buzzed. David, her husband of eleven months, asking if she'd be home for dinner. Again.

Emma stared at the screen, thumb hovering over the keyboard. She'd been staying at her mother's place for weeks, sleeping in the twin bed she'd grown up in, avoiding the conversations she and David needed to have. The conversations that started with "I don't want children" and ended with "then what are we doing here?"

On the refrigerator, held by a magnet shaped like a baseball, was a photograph of Emma's father at a game in 1985. He'd been dead for thirty years, but in the photo he was alive, mid-swing, his face split by a grin. Her mother had kept it there through three moves and two refrigerators.

Emma's mother had loved baseball—the ritual of it, the statistics, the way it stretched time so that a single afternoon could feel like a lifetime. She'd taught Emma to keep score, to appreciate the geometry of the field, to understand that sometimes the most beautiful plays were the ones that ended in outs.

"Sometimes," her mother had said once, watching a batter strike out with the bases loaded, "the bravest thing you can do is walk away."

Emma took the photograph from the refrigerator. She put it in the box with the vitamins and the moisturizer and the cat's favorite bowl.

Then she called David.

"I'm coming home," she said. "But we need to talk."

Clementine meowed, headbutting Emma's shin. Emma picked her up, the cat's weight warm and solid against her chest, and walked out of the kitchen she'd known her whole life, leaving the rest of the boxes for tomorrow.