The Last Inning

The orange sat on the counter, its bright skin already dimpling in the autumn air. Maria hadn't touched it in three days—not since the phone call that hollowed out the apartment. The fertility clinic's voice had been gentle, practiced: the embryos hadn't taken. Something about chromosomal abnormalities, vitamin deficiencies, her age. Thirty-eight suddenly felt ancient.

She opened the cabinet where the prenatal vitamins lived in their white plastic bottle, pills she'd swallowed religiously for six months. Her hand hovered over them, then moved to the whiskey bottle behind. The cat—Barnaby, the tabby they'd adopted when they bought this house two years ago, optimistic and stupid with hope—wound around her ankles, his purr like a small engine struggling to turn over in the cold.

"You're still here," she said to him. "You didn't get the memo."

Mark's baseball glove sat on the mantle, next to the urn that held his father's ashes. They were supposed to scatter them at Cooperstown this summer, make a pilgrimage Mark had talked about for years. Now the glove was gathering dust, its leather stiffening without use. Mark hadn't picked it up since the funeral. He hadn't picked much of anything up since then.

The front door opened. Mark's key in the lock, the familiar thud of his bag hitting the floor. Maria didn't turn. She could hear him moving through the kitchen, the refrigerator opening, closing. Then his footsteps behind her.

"What are you doing?" he asked, seeing the whiskey bottle.

"Decided I don't need the vitamins anymore," she said. "Seems pointless."

Mark was silent for a long moment. When she finally turned, he was holding the orange, his thumb breaking the skin, releasing the sharp citrus scent that suddenly filled the room. He peeled it slowly, methodically, the way his mother had taught him when he was a boy.

"My dad loved oranges," Mark said, his voice rough. "After games, when I was playing baseball in high school. He'd buy a whole bag, sit in the stands peeling them. Said they were better than Gatorade." He held out a segment to her. "He was wrong. They're messy. They stick to your fingers."

Maria took it. The juice burst on her tongue, shockingly sour and sweet. Mark's father had been dead six months. The embryos, three days. Some griefs you saw coming. Others ambushed you.

"We can still go to Cooperstown," Mark said quietly. "Dad's ashes aren't going anywhere. Neither are we."

Barnaby jumped onto the counter, batting at the orange peel. Mark laughed, a sound rusty from disuse. He reached for the whiskey bottle, poured two fingers into each of the juice glasses Maria had set out.

"To the vitamins that didn't work," he said.

"To the oranges," she said. "To the damn cat who doesn't know anything's wrong."

"To baseball," Mark added. "To extra innings."

They clinked glasses. The whiskey burned going down, good and clean. Outside, the autumn light was failing, everything in the kitchen suspended in that blue moment before night. They would scatter the ashes in spring. They would try again, or they wouldn't. For now, there was the cat, the orange, the dimming light, and each other. Not nothing. Not everything, but not nothing.