The Last Supper

Margaret arranged the papaya and spinach on the plate with surgical precision, the way she'd arranged her entire marriage—meticulously, desperately, hoping the presentation would compensate for what was missing underneath. Richard was late again. The papaya's orange flesh glistened under the pendant lights, looking too vibrant for a Tuesday evening that had begun with couples therapy and would end with separate bedrooms.

She'd started taking the vitamin D supplements after the miscarriage, the same month Richard stopped coming home before midnight. The doctor said it was for her bones, but Margaret knew it was really for the hollow space that had opened inside her chest, a place where something was supposed to be living and growing.

The cat—Barnaby—jumped onto the counter and nudged her hand with his head, purring like a small engine. Richard had brought him home five years ago as a kitten, a "we" present before they'd become two people who happened to sleep in the same house. Now Barnaby was the only one who touched her with any regularity.

Lightning cracked the kitchen window, sudden and violent, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. Margaret pressed her forehead against the cold glass. She'd heard Richard's new assistant was twenty-six, which was the age Margaret had been when she'd still believed that love was something you could earn through patience and careful arrangement of fruit.

She slid the spinach into the trash disposal and watched it disappear, a green vortex down the drain. When Richard finally walked through the door, smelling of whiskey and someone else's perfume, Margaret was sitting in the dark with nothing but a perfect, untouched slice of papaya, waiting to ask him the question she'd been rehearsing for three months: what happens when you realize you've built a life around someone who's already left?