The Last Good Season

Ellen sat in the parking lot of the pharmacy, staring at the bottle of vitamin D pills in her hand. The doctor had said it would help with the fatigue, with the bone-deep exhaustion that had settled in like a heavy fog since Mark left three months ago. She popped the cap and swallowed one dry, feeling like a zombie going through the motions of a life she no longer recognized.

Her phone buzzed. David. Again.

"Pick you up at six?" he'd texted. "Ben's game."

Ben was twelve now, the same age Mark had been when Ellen fell in love with baseball—really fell in love, not just the polite childhood appreciation she'd shown before. The crack of the bat, the particular way the dust rose when a player slid into home, the rhythm of something so much larger than yourself. She'd loved that Mark had loved it too, until he didn't love her enough to stay.

David was different. He'd never cared about sports, had been bewildered when she'd explained why Friday nights meant sitting on cold metal bleachers instead of going to dinner. But he showed up. He brought her coffee without asking. He remembered she took her vitamins.

She found herself driving to the field anyway, the evening sun casting long shadows across the outfield. Ben spotted her from the dugout and waved—his team was down by two, bottom of the sixth. David was already there, saving her a seat, thermos of tea in hand.

"Hey," he said, pressing it into her cold fingers. "How was work?"

"Long." She leaned into him, surprising herself. "Thank you for being here."

Ben stepped up to the plate. The vitamin D should have kicked in by now, but what she felt wasn't energy—it was something else. Something like hope.

The pitch came. Ben connected. The ball sailed into the gathering dusk, and for a moment, everything about the past three months—the pills, the sleepless nights, the hollow echo of Mark's absence—seemed to suspend in the air. Ben rounded third, his face flushed with effort and joy. David squeezed her hand.

"We're staying," she said. "For the next inning too."

He nodded, already knowing.

The night air was cooling, and somewhere beyond the lights, stars were appearing one by one. Ellen thought about how the body needed certain things to heal, how the soul needed other things entirely. And how sometimes, somehow, you found both in the most unlikely places.