The Last Good Season

The baseball sat on his mantel like a fossilized memory—signed by '86 Mets, the ink faded now, just like the years. Marcus had given it to him after their last real conversation, the one where they'd sat on a fire escape in Queens and admitted they were both scared of turning thirty. That was four years ago.

Now Marcus was gone, and David was sitting in his dead friend's apartment with a stubborn calico cat named Bull—Marcus's joke, naming the meanest animal on the block after the market that had ruined their investment portfolio. The cat hissed at him from atop the refrigerator.

"You too, huh?" David said. "He left me everything. The debt. The cat. The baseball."

The box from the lawyer had also contained Marcus's old baseball glove, oiled and wrapped in plastic. David hadn't played since college, but something made him pull it on. The leather still smelled like his friend—cigarettes and coconut shampoo and that particular optimism Marcus had carried even when their startup went under.

He took the signed baseball outside. The alley behind Marcus's building had a rusted hoop someone had bent into something resembling a strike zone. David wound up and threw.

The ball hit the metal with a clang that echoed through the Manhattan canyon. He threw again, and again, until his shoulder burned and tears were streaming down his face—not quiet tears, but the ugly kind that come when you realize you'll never see someone again.

Bull appeared on the fire escape, watching him with yellow eyes. David sat on the concrete and put his face in his hands. The cat jumped down and head-butted his shin, purring.

"Okay," David said. "Okay."

He packed the baseball and glove into the box, along with Marcus's journals. Then he picked up Bull, who surprisingly didn't scratch him, and carried them both toward the subway. The season was over, but somewhere, somehow, there would be another one. That's what Marcus would have said.