The Last Papaya

Elise stood in the grocery aisle, weeping over a papaya. It was ridiculous—she was thirty-four, a litigation associate who could dismantle hostile witnesses without blinking, yet here she was, undone by tropical fruit in the produce section of a midwestern supermarket.

"You look like you need a friend," said a voice beside her.

She turned to find a woman with severe cheekbones and kind eyes, cart filled with practical things: bread, milk, a bag of oranges that glowed like small suns against the fluorescent lights.

"It's the papaya," Elise managed. "Jack always ate them. Every Sunday morning. He'd slice them and say they tasted like vacation."

"Jack?"

"My husband. Ex-husband, technically. The papers came through last week."

The woman nodded, like this was information she could work with. "I'm Mara."

"Elise."

"Well, Elise, my mother used to say that grief is like bearing something you can't put down. You just have to learn to carry it differently."

"That's terrible advice."

"It is, actually. But she was wrong about everything else, so I figured this might be too."

Elise laughed, something wet and startled in her throat.

"Come home with me," Mara said. "I have goldfish. They're remarkably soothing to watch. Also gin."

The goldfish turned out to be a single melancholy creature swimming endless circles in a bowl on Mara's kitchen counter. "His name is Bear," she said, pouring two generous fingers of gin. "Because he lumbers."

They talked until dawn—not about Jack or the papaya, but about everything else. The way they'd both disappointed their mothers. The jobs that drained them. The particular loneliness of being alive in a world that kept demanding you participate.

When Elise left, the sky was that bruised orange before sunrise. She walked home carrying nothing, lighter somehow, Bear's small circles echoing in her chest, Mara's laugh tangled in her hair, the papaya still on the grocery store shelf, waiting for someone who needed a vacation.