The Last Orange

Margaret sat on the floor of her half-empty living room, the cable guy crouched beside the disconnected coaxial outlet. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with grease-stained fingers and eyes that wouldn't meet hers.

"That'll be it, ma'am. Service transferred to the new address."

She nodded, pressing her lips together. Forty years of marriage dissolved into paperwork and cardboard boxes. Richard had left the orange curtains—that was his final cruelty. They clashed with everything she'd chosen.

The dog, Buster, had died two months before Richard walked out. Margaret had found herself talking to the empty space where Buster's bed used to be, having one-sided conversations about dinner, about the weather, about the terrible silence that had settled over their marriage like dust.

Now she watched the cable guy pack his tools, thinking about how Richard used to say they needed to upgrade their package. More channels, better connection—as if bandwidth could fix what was broken between them. They hadn't really spoken in years, just exchanged information about schedules and bills, their marriage reduced to the bandwidth of practical necessities.

"Ma'am?" The cable guy was standing, waiting.

She blinked. "Sorry. Here." She pressed a crumpled twenty into his palm.

He hesitated. "You okay?"

Margaret almost laughed. She was sixty-two, starting over in a one-bedroom apartment across town, sleeping alone for the first time since 1979. "I will be."

After he left, she peeled the last orange from the fruit bowl—the fruit bowl Richard's mother had given them as a wedding gift. The rind was thick, bitter under her fingernails. She ate it in sections, standing in the kitchen that wasn't hers anymore, juice running down her chin, while the late afternoon light through those hideous orange curtains turned everything gold and strange.

She would leave the curtains. Not because she wanted them, but because she'd earned the right to hate them properly, to have something in this new life that was unequivocally, beautifully hers to despise.