The Last Papaya

Maria lay on the beach chair, her iPhone face down on her chest like a sleeping creature. The screen had been dark for twenty minutes — a personal record since they'd arrived in Puerto Rico. Behind her sunglasses, she watched Daniel. He stood knee-deep in the turquoise water, phone pressed to his ear, nodding at someone who couldn't see him.

Another work crisis. Another fire that only he could extinguish.

She traced the lines in her palm, something she'd done since childhood when she needed comfort. The lifeline, the heart line — maps to nowhere she'd wanted to go. At thirty-seven, she'd begun to understand that her mother's palm readings were just another way to avoid the truth about their unraveling marriage.

"I'm sorry," Daniel said, dropping into the chair beside her. "That was the new VP of Marketing. She's... enthusiastic."

"Zombie," Maria said.

"What?"

"That's what we are. Not the brain-eating kind. The other kind. The ones who shuffle through their days, mouths half-open, staring at screens while the world happens to someone else." She sat up, her iPhone sliding onto the sand. "Remember when we used to talk? Actually talk?"

Daniel looked at her — really looked at her — for the first time in days. "I thought we were happy."

"We're not unhappy. That's worse." She plucked a slice of papaya from the fruit plate between them. The hotel had cut it into perfect wedges, its flesh orange-pink and glistening. "My grandmother always said papaya tastes like loss. Sweet, but with something underneath you can't quite name."

He took a wedge from her hand, their fingers brushing. "Maybe that's just life. The sweetness and the something else."

"Maybe." She ate the rest in one bite, juice running down her chin. "Or maybe we stop acting like zombies and start living again. Starting now."

Daniel set his phone on the table, screen down, and took her hand. "Okay. But first — that papaya really is good."

Maria laughed, and it felt like something waking up inside her chest. "Try the one with lime. It tastes like beginning."