The Last Serve

The padel court shimmered in the Mexican heat, a green rectangle under the merciless sun. Elena adjusted her wide-brimmed hat, the crown damp with sweat, and watched Marcos serve. His movements were precise, practiced—the way he did everything. The way he'd looked at her across the breakfast table that morning, when she'd told him she wasn't taking the prenatal vitamins anymore.

"Your serve," he said now, bouncing the ball on the clay.

She stepped forward, racket raised. Her palm was slick against the grip. Three years of fertility treatments. Three years of vitamins, injections, timed intercourse, hope dwindling like a beach sunset. Three years of Marcos asking, with terrible patience, "Are you sure you don't want to try just once more?"

The ball came at her. She missed.

"You're distracted," Marcos said, retrieving the ball from the fence. "Is it work?"

"No."

"Then what?"

She looked at him—at his handsome, exhausted face, at the way his shirt clung to his chest. He was thirty-five now. They were thirty-five. This wasn't the life they'd imagined.

"I ordered spinach for lunch," he said, apropos of nothing. "And salmon. For the omega-3s."

Elena felt something crack inside her.

"Stop."

"What?"

"The spinach. The vitamins. The everything." She walked to the net. "Marcos, I'm done. I want to drink wine in the middle of the week. I want to eat unpasteurized cheese. I want to not care about my cervical mucus."

He stood there, racket hanging at his side. Behind him, palm fronds stirred in the breeze.

"But the baby," he said quietly.

"Maybe there isn't one. Maybe we adopt. Maybe we don't." She stepped closer to the net. "Maybe we figure out who we are when we're not trying to become parents."

The silence stretched between them, longer than any serve, heavier than any decision they'd ever made. Then Marcos set down his racket and walked to the net too. He reached through, his palm finding hers.

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

Elena tilted her hat back and looked up at the sky. For the first time in three years, she didn't calculate anything.