The Last Season

Margaret stood in the grocery aisle, staring at the bag of spinach like it was a foreign object she'd never encountered before. Her palm still tingled from where David had grabbed it earlier—not violently, but with that familiar desperation that had become their default. The spinach was organic, pre-washed, expensive. Everything in their life was expensive now.

She dropped it in the cart anyway.

Three checkout lanes over, a father was teaching his son to swing a baseball bat using an empty paper towel roll. The boy kept missing. "Eye on the ball," the father said, his voice patient in a way David's hadn't been in years. Margaret remembered her own father's baseball caps, how they'd smelled of tobacco and sweat, how he'd doff his hat whenever a woman entered the room. A gesture from another time.

Their dog, Buster, had died two months ago. David had cried for twenty minutes and then gone back to work. Margaret had found herself sitting on the kitchen floor for hours, waiting for the click-clack of claws that never came. Sometimes she still heard it. Sometimes she still set down two plates for dinner.

She pushed the cart toward the exit. Through the automatic doors, she saw him—David, standing by their car, wearing that hat she'd bought him in Rome. The one he swore he'd never take off. The one he wasn't wearing the night he told her he'd met someone else. Someone who understood him. Someone who made him feel alive again.

Her palm tingled again, but this time she realized it wasn't from his grip. It was from holding onto something that had already let go of her.

"Margaret," he said when she reached the car. "I was worried."

She looked at his hat. At the spinach in the cart. At the space where Buster used to sit.

"I know," she said, and somehow that was the saddest part of all. "I know you were."