The Last Inning

The baseball sat on the mantelpiece, gathering dust like unspoken words between us. It had been three years since Mark's funeral, and I still couldn't bring myself to touch it—the ball he caught the night he proposed, right there in the stands at Fenway, sunscreen sticky on our skin, future stretching before us like an endless inning.

I adjusted my father's old fedora, the hat now smelling of mothballs and memories. Dad had given it to me the week before he died, along with a cryptic speech about how a man's headgear says more about him than his resume. I wore it to job interviews, first dates, to court hearings when I was trying to keep the house after the layoffs started. The hat was armor against a world that kept demanding I be someone I wasn't sure I remembered how to be.

My iPhone buzzed—her again. Sarah, the woman from grief group who said all the right things but whose eyes always wandered to the exit sign. She wanted to know if I was coming to tonight's meeting, as if sitting in a circle with other broken people could somehow make us whole again. I stared at the screen, thumb hovering over the message, then watched as the notification dissolved into nothingness.

That's when I saw it through the kitchen window—a black bear, massive and improbable, ambling across the backyard like it owned the mortgage. It stopped near the old oak where Mark had carved our initials, now just scar tissue in the bark. The bear sniffed the air, then turned toward the house, toward me.

I should have been afraid. I should have called animal control or grabbed Mark's old baseball bat. Instead, I found myself opening the back door, stepping onto the porch in my socks. The bear watched me, dark eyes intelligent and ancient. It didn't move to attack. It just stood there, waiting.

"You miss him too, don't you?" I whispered, the words catching in my throat. The bear dipped its head, almost like a nod, then turned and loped back into the woods, leaving me alone with the baseball, the hat, and the sudden, terrible understanding that grief is not something you survive—it's something you carry, like a heavy coat you can never quite take off, even in summer.