The Lightning Summer

Margot stood on the balcony of her Chicago apartment, watching the sky turn that bruised orange color that comes right before a storm. She was thirty-eight, alone again, and holding her father's old baseball glove like it might somehow bridge the five-year silence between them.

"You're running from it, Margot," David had told her, packing his things last Tuesday. "You've been running since the funeral."

He wasn't wrong. Her father had been a bear of a man — loud, volatile, terrifyingly present. His absence had left a space she kept filling with wrong men, wrong jobs, wrong cities. Now David was gone too, and she was back where she started.

The first lightning strike hit somewhere over Lake Michigan, a white scar across the darkening sky. She remembered sitting behind home plate with her father at Wrigley, how he'd shouted instructions to players who couldn't hear him, his hand heavy on her shoulder, the smell of beer and sweat and those awful orange slices he'd packed for the seventh inning stretch.

"You think too much," he'd told her once, when she was twelve and crying over something she couldn't articulate. "That's your problem. You're always in your head instead of in the game."

She wasn't in her head anymore. She was here, thirty-eight and childless and freshly divorced, watching the rain finally break, watching the lightning illuminate the alleyway where she'd first kissed David three years ago.

Her phone buzzed. Unknown number.

"Margot?" The voice was thick, aged. "It's your dad's friend, Carl. From the softball league. He's sick, Margot. He's asking for you."

The storm raged harder. She gripped the baseball glove until her knuckles went white.

"He's at Northwestern. Room 412."

She was still running, she realized. She'd always been running. But maybe sometimes you run toward things instead of away from them.

Margot went inside, found her keys, and walked out into the storm.