The Last Inning

The coaxial cable had been fraying for months, dangling from the wall like a dead snake. Tonight, it finally snapped. Margaret sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the static-filled television screen, wondering if this was some kind of sign.

She reached for the bedside table and found Joe's vitamin regimen. Vitamin D for his bones, B-complex for his nerves, Omega-3 for his heart. The morning he'd died, she'd watched him swallow them with water, his hands trembling slightly. "For the long game," he'd said, though they'd both known there wasn't much game left.

Now she picked up his old baseball glove, leather worn smooth from decades of catch games in the backyard. Their son, David, had stopped playing catch at fourteen, too cool for father-son rituals. Joe had never stopped waiting on the porch, glove in hand, hoping.

The summer after David left for college, a bear had wandered into their subdivision. Margaret remembered standing at the kitchen window, watching Joe approach it slowly, the baseball bat raised like some ridiculous weapon against nature itself. The bear had merely looked at him with mild interest before ambling away. Joe had come inside shaking, not from fear but from something else—the sudden realization that he couldn't protect his family from anything anymore.

"We're all just pretending," he'd told her later, pouring whiskey into two glasses. "Pretending we're not terrified. Pretending the cable's not going to cut. Pretending our kids aren't leaving us."

She'd thought he was being dramatic. Now she understood.

Margaret walked to the window and looked out at the empty street. She was fifty-three years old, alone in a house that felt too big, with a baseball glove that still smelled like his hands and a television that wouldn't work. The irony wasn't lost on her—she'd spent years wishing Joe would stop watching baseball, and now she'd give anything for one more inning, one more commercial, one more moment of him beside her on the couch.

The bear of grief had finally caught up to her, and there was no running this time. Margaret set the glove down carefully, opened the vitamin bottle, and swallowed two pills without water. Something to keep her going through the long, dark night ahead.