The Last Inning

The lightning flashed across the sky just as Maya walked out the door, and I thought: how perfectly cinematic. She was running before the screen door even slammed—running to her car, running away from ten years of marriage, running toward whatever fresh start she'd already lined up with someone who appreciated her avant-garde pottery.

I stood in the kitchen, frozen, holding a pot of wilting spinach. We'd argued about dinner again. I'd wanted baseball and burgers at the sports bar; she'd wanted to try this new vegan place. The spinach had been my compromise—my olive branch, wilted and pathetic now, just like everything else.

The thunder shook the windows. Outside, I could hear her engine start. I should have gone after her. I should have begged, or at least demanded an explanation about the texts I'd found. But I didn't move. I just stood there, watching the spinach steam in the cooling pot, thinking about that day at the baseball stadium when she'd agreed to marry me. The bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded. I'd kissed her while the crowd erupted around us. She'd laughed, wiping mustard from my chin, saying yes through tears and stadium noise.

Now she was gone, and I was alone with dinner for one and a forecast calling for storms all week. The radio on the counter was still broadcasting the game—our team down by three, bottom of the ninth. I turned it off. The silence was worse than the noise.

I dumped the spinach in the trash. Some endings, I realized, don't deserve a ceremonial last meal. They don't deserve the drama of lightning or the poetry of rain. They just deserve to be over, quickly and cleanly, like a called game when the weather turns.