The Last Orange at Sunset

Margaret stood before the bathroom mirror, tweezers in hand, plucking the coarse silver hairs from her chin. Each pull was a small rebellion against time, a denial of the woman her mother had become — the woman with the mustache she'd refused to address, even as her daughters whispered about it in the kitchen.

"You're obsessing again," David called from the bedroom. They'd had this conversation before, or something like it. The theme was always Margaret's inability to let things be.

"I'm maintaining," she said, but he'd already turned away.

The dog — Buster, a rescue with anxiety issues and torn ears from street fights in his past life — whined at the door. He could sense the tension that lived between them like third furniture. Margaret let him in and he pressed his warm flank against her leg, the only creature in the house who seemed to accept her without condition.

She went to the kitchen. There was one orange left on the counter, the skin dimpled and beginning to soften at the edges. David had brought a bag home last week, back when they were still trying. Back when he'd suggested they cook together, learn Spanish, take dance lessons. All the things couples did when they needed to remember why they'd chosen each other.

The orange had sat there since Tuesday. She'd meant to eat it. She'd meant to do a lot of things.

Buster nosed her hand. His fur smelled of rain and the earthy, honest scent of a creature who lived entirely in the present. Margaret scratched behind his torn left ear and felt the strange, sad mercy of animals — how they loved without expectation, how they remained loyal to the hand that fed them even when that hand became distant, distracted, wrapped up in its own quiet tragedy.

She peeled the orange. The spray of citrus hit her like something from another lifetime, from before the silence had settled into the spaces between them. The section she placed on her tongue was impossibly sweet, almost violent with brightness.

She wondered if David remembered the orange grove they'd visited on that trip to California, before the miscarriages, before the quiet understanding that they would never be parents to anyone but each other. He'd held her waist as they walked between trees heavy with fruit, his breath warm against her hair in the California sun.

Buster licked her ankle. Margaret ate the rest of the orange standing at the counter, juice running down her chin, not bothering to wipe it away. For once, she let herself be messy, let herself be the kind of woman who let things drip.

She would tell David tonight, over the wine they'd been drinking too much of lately. She would tell him that she was tired of fighting time, tired of plucking and maintaining and pretending they weren't lonely together in this house that had become too large for two.

Or maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she would just sit beside him on the couch while Buster sighed at their feet, and let the silence be what it was — a living thing, breathing between them, worthy of its own strange kind of love.