The Last Papaya

The hat sat on my desk for three weeks—a gray fedora with a sweat-stained band, smelling of old tobacco and rain. It belonged to Marcus, though 'belonged' feels generous for a man who collected possessions like people collect grudges. He'd left it at my apartment the night he told me he was moving to Paris with someone I'd introduced him to at a party three months earlier. Some friend.

I almost threw it out. Instead, I found myself driving to his mother's house on the edge of town, past the papaya tree we'd planted together during that summer we tried to become farmers—both of us recently divorced, both of us pretending we weren't lonely. The tree had died within months. Our friendship had taken longer.

His mother opened the door, eyes hollowed by something she wouldn't name. She took the hat without asking why I'd brought it, why I hadn't seen Marcus in six months, why I was shaking.

"He kept a papaya in his pocket," she said, apropos of nothing we'd been saying. "When he was a boy. For luck. He said you gave it to him."

I had. At the airport, when he was leaving for college. I'd carved our initials into it with a house key. I'd forgotten until this moment.

"He died last week," she said, and I thought of the papaya tree, how we'd watered it every day even when the leaves turned brown and fell. How some things you keep watering long after you should have walked away.

I stood there holding nothing, and the space between grief and relief was smaller than I wanted to admit.