The Last Inning

Margaret stood by her cubicle, watching Leonard pack his box. Thirty years at the firm, reduced to a goldfish bowl, a framed photo of his daughter, and a baseball signed by some minor league player from 1987.

"They're calling it a restructuring," Leonard said, not looking at her. "I call it bullshit."

The word hung in the air like smoke. Margaret wanted to tell him about the meeting she'd sat in yesterday, the one where the vice president—twenty-eight years old, skin glowing with the confidence of someone who'd never been told no—had drawn a graph on the whiteboard showing how Leonard's position was redundant. But she said nothing. That was the thing about being the office caretaker; you held everyone's secrets in your chest like stones.

"You going to be okay?" she asked instead.

Leonard shrugged. His shoulders, once broad from collegiate baseball, now slumped forward. "Marilyn died two years ago. The house is too big. Maybe this is a sign."

He held up the goldfish bowl. The orange fish inside darted nervously, unaware it was witnessing an ending.

"You want him?"

Margaret hesitated. She was fifty-three, alone in a one-bedroom apartment, estranged from a son who lived three states away and sent birthday cards via Facebook Messenger. "What's his name?"

"Buster. Like Posey. Giants won the World Series the year Marilyn bought him for me."

She took the bowl. The fish swam to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent expectation.

"Feed him once a day. Don't overdo it. That's the mistake everyone makes with goldfish—they think they're hungry, but really they're just bored."

Margaret nodded, though she wasn't sure which of them he was talking about.

The walk back to her desk felt longer than usual. Around her, the office hummed with the rhythmic clicking of keyboards and muted phone conversations—the machinery of capitalism continuing without pause. She placed Buster on her desk next to her monitor, where he caught the light from the window and scattered it across her keyboard in orange ripples.

Her son had played baseball once, she remembered suddenly. T-ball, when he was six. He'd cried when he struck out, and she'd told him it didn't matter, that the game was just a game. But she'd been lying. She knew now that everything mattered eventually—all the small disappointments accumulated like silt at the bottom of a river, until one day you looked up and realized you'd been buried alive.

Her phone buzzed. A message from her boss: "Can we chat?"

Margaret looked at the fish swimming in his too-small world, unaware that the bowl had walls. Then she typed back: "Give me ten minutes."

She stood up. She didn't know what would happen next, but for the first time in years, she was ready to play.