The Last Inning

Margaret stood before the bathroom mirror, tweezers in hand, plucking another coarse chin hair that had appeared overnight. At forty-seven, her body felt like a stranger's house she was no longer welcome in. The vitamin supplements lined up on the counter—D for bones, B for energy, biotin for the hair that kept thinning despite her prayers. She swallowed them dry, morning ritual completed.

"You're going to be late," David called from the bedroom, already dressed in his uniform. The baseball jersey hung loose on his frame these days. They were both thinner now, pared down by three years of unsuccessful fertility treatments and the quiet erosion that followed.

"I'm coming," she said. Today was the annual faculty versus students game, a tradition she used to love. Now it just felt like another performance of a life she'd somehow stumbled into.

The drive to the university was silent. David kept one hand on the steering wheel, the other tapping his thigh—that nervous tic she'd once found endearing, now simply exhausting.

"You know," he said, pulling into the parking lot, "my brother says the clinic in Chicago has a forty percent success rate."

"And costs the down payment on a house." She watched the students gathering on the field, young and luminous and entirely unaware of how quickly it would all slip away from them.

The game was a slaughter. The students played with ruthless efficiency, their bodies still obedient to their ambitions. Margaret stood in right field, sweating through her shirt, thinking about the swimming pool she'd joined last month—how she'd slip into the cool blue silence and stay under as long as her lungs allowed, surfacing gasping, paradoxically alive.

Then came the bottom of the ninth. Two outs, bases loaded. David stepped up to the plate, looking smaller than she remembered. The student pitcher—some scholarship kid with a fastball like aggression itself—wound up and threw. The ball connected with David's bat with a sound like breaking glass.

It soared toward right field. Margaret ran, her bad knee screaming, thinking absurdly of a bull she'd once seen in Spain, how it had charged again and again despite inevitable defeat. The ball descended through the white sky. She stretched her gloved hand upward and caught it, her shoulder popping, heart hammering.

The silence was absolute. Then David rounded third base, heading home, and she saw it on his face—that pure, uncomplicated joy she hadn't witnessed in years. He scored, and their teammates surged around him, and she stood alone in right field holding the ball that had ended the game, understanding with sudden crystalline clarity that she would catch this thing for him every single time, even if it broke her. Even if they never did have that baby. Even if they both grew old and strange and forgotten. She would catch it.