The Last Papaya

Maria stood in the produce aisle, holding a papaya like a heart she couldn't quite commit to. At 47, she'd become expert at the art of almost—almost leaving her marriage, almost finishing her novel, almost becoming the person her dead mother believed she could be.

The papaya's skin yielded softly under her thumb. Rick used to bring them home from the bodega on 5th, back when they still touched each other without flinching. Before the accident. Before their son's hair fell out in clumps and Rick started wearing that rucked-up fishing hat everywhere, like armor against a world that had already taken too much.

Now she caught glimpses of her husband moving through their house like a ghost haunting his own life—shuffling to the kitchen at 3 AM, standing silent in doorways, eyes fixed on nothing. The doctors called it depression. Maria thought of it as something more honest: a hollowing out.

Their golden retriever, Buster, still waited by the door every evening. The dog's loyalty had become a kind of accusation, his thumping tail measuring time they'd never get back.

"Maria?" A voice behind her. She turned to find David—her writing partner, her almost-affair from three years ago—standing there with shopping cart full of Lean Cuisine and regret. His hair had thinned since she'd last seen him. He looked exhausted, hopeful, dangerous.

"You're still alive," she said.

"Most days." His gaze dropped to the papaya in her hands. "Rick liked papaya."

"Rick is dead, David."

"What?"

"Last month." She pressed the fruit to her chest. "I keep forgetting to tell people. It keeps not feeling real."

David's face crumpled. Maria realized then that she'd been walking around hollowed out too, a zombie in her own right, moving through the motions while something vital rotted away inside her. The papaya's skin split under her grip, sweet juice running between her fingers like the first honest thing that had happened in months.

"I should go," she said, but she didn't move.

"Come to dinner, Maria. Just dinner."

She looked at the papaya, at David, at the version of herself that might still exist somewhere beyond all this almost. "Buy wine," she said. "The kind that tastes like making bad decisions."