The Last Inning of Trying

The iPhone sat on the scarred mahogany of O'Malley's bar like a guilty conscience, its screen illuminating every thirty seconds with notifications Marcus refused to check. Sheila had walked out three mornings ago, taking the good towels and his ability to breathe normally.

"Another round?" the bartender asked, and Marcus nodded, watching the baseball game on the mounted television. Some kid barely old enough to drink was stepping up to the plate—number twenty-four, same number Marcus had worn back when he'd almost made the team in college, before the shoulder injury, before the mortgage, before the slow accumulation of compromises that felt less like living and more like erosion.

He dipped a chip into the spinach artichoke dip, the only thing on the menu that pretended toward nutritional value. Spinach. Sheila had always made him eat more greens, always with that gentle insistence that used to feel like care and lately felt like correction. Now he could eat whatever he wanted. Now he could do whatever he wanted. The freedom tasted like processed cheese and resentment.

The kid on screen struck out swinging. The camera cut to his face—young, devastated, the kind of pure disappointment that older men learned to hide behind careful expressions.

"That's a bunch of bull," someone muttered down the bar, and Marcus almost laughed. Because wasn't that the truth? His whole life had been a careful construction of bull—pretending he was happy in sales, pretending he didn't hate his commute, pretending they were fine when they'd stopped being fine years ago. The word had always seemed crude, but there was something honest about it, something primal.

His iPhone buzzed again. Marcus didn't need to look to know it was Sheila's mother, or maybe the dentist office confirming his appointment, or some other piece of the life he'd built that was now demanding he acknowledge its existence.

He left the phone on the bar, walked out into the cold October air, and for the first time in twenty years, didn't check his pockets to make sure he had it. Let it ring. Let it buzz. Let the whole damn apparatus of his carefully constructed middle-class existence spin itself into exhaustion without him.

The walk home took twenty minutes. By the time he reached their driveway, he was crying—not the dignified tears of the movies, but the ugly, snot-thick weeping of a man finally, finally telling himself the truth.