The Last Papaya

Marvin hung from the telephone pole like a forgotten ornament, the coiled cable around his shoulder heavier than it had any right to be. Thirty years of climbing, connecting houses to worlds he'd never visit. His knees ached in the damp September air.

"You still wearing that ridiculous hat?" called Sharon from below, squinting up at him. She held the papaya he'd bought at lunch—her latest obsession, since the doctor said cholesterol. "It makes you look like you're trying too hard."

Marvin adjusted the baseball cap, frayed at the brim from countless games he'd watched alone. "It keeps the sun out of my eyes. You want this connected or not?"

"I want a lot of things," she said, but she was smiling, that soft, tired smile that had kept him from leaving during the rough years. "Including dinner that doesn't come from a drive-through."

Later, in their kitchen with the hum of the refrigerator the only sound between them, Marvin watched her cut into the papaya. Its flesh was the color of sunset, the same shade as the sky in Miami, where they'd gone for their honeymoon. Before the cable company. Before the mortgage. Before the baby that never came.

"Remember papaya for breakfast every morning?" she asked, as if reading his thoughts. "You said you'd get sick of it in a week."

"I lied," Marvin said. "I'd still be eating it if we were still there."

Sharon set down her knife. The room seemed to shrink around them, filled with all the words they'd never said. Cable snaked through walls behind the paint, connecting them to everything except each other. The baseball games he watched were just noise now, something to fill the silence.

"We could go back," she said quietly. "Before Medicare, before—"

"Before what?" Marvin couldn't keep the bitterness from his voice. "Before we became people who talk about cable bills and cholesterol and whether the hat looks stupid?"

"We became those people together." Sharon reached across the table, her hand covering his. "That's not nothing, Marvin."

He looked at their joined hands, the papaya between them, the cable bill on the counter. Somewhere a distant baseball game drifted through an open window—cheers, the crack of a bat, the rhythm of a world that kept moving whether you were ready or not.

Marvin took off his hat. "Tomorrow," he said. "Let's go somewhere. Anywhere."

Sharon squeezed his hand. "I'll look up flights."

The papaya sat between them, impossibly bright, impossibly sweet. A small thing, really. But small things were the only ones worth saving.