The Last Papaya

Eleven years after the divorce, David still caught himself shopping for two. The papaya sat in his cart, soft and yielding, its skin blushing from green to sunset orange—Maria's favorite. He hadn't bought one since she left. Hadn't wanted to.

At fifty-two, he'd finally learned that swallowing pride didn't require choking it down with a vitamin supplement the size of a horse pill. His therapist said grief was like swimming against a current: the harder you fight, the faster you exhaust yourself. Sometimes you had to float.

The corporate merger had been brutal—twenty years of loyalty reduced to a severance package and a hollowed-out 401k. The new management, a crew of thirty-year-old sharks in designer suits, had looked at him like he was vintage equipment. Obsolete. David had taken the buyout instead of letting them fire him. Dignity, he told himself. His savings account disagreed.

Now he stood in the tropical fruit section of Whole Foods, palm sweating against the cool metal of his shopping cart. The papaya whispered of breakfasts on their tenth anniversary trip to Costa Rica, of the way Maria had laughed—really laughed, head thrown back, hair wild—when a howler monkey had stolen their lunch.

That trip had been their last good thing together. Before the infertility treatments. Before the affair. Before the lawyers sliced their life in half like a ripe fruit.

A man with a thick neck and an expensive watch elbowed past him, nearly toppling a display of organic mangoes. This was the breed that had destroyed his company—bull in a china shop mentality, shareholders be damned. David felt a spark of something hot and familiar. Anger, mostly. But also something like clarity.

He placed the papaya gently in his cart.

Maria had sent him a text three weeks ago. She was getting remarried. Some architect in Santa Fe. She'd said she hoped he was happy. David had stared at his phone for an hour before typing back: I hope you are too.

He wasn't unhappy. Not exactly. His life was smaller now, quieter. No epic arguments at midnight. No someone else's disappointments to carry. But no one to notice when his laugh lines had deepened, or that he'd stopped wearing cologne because who would smell it?

David paid for his groceries and walked to his car. The papaya rode shotgun in the passenger seat. Tomorrow morning, he would cut it open, scrape out the seeds, and eat it alone at his kitchen table. And maybe—just maybe—it wouldn't taste like goodbye anymore.

Maybe it would just taste like papaya.

The engine turned over on the first try. Some things, at least, still worked.