The Mathematics of Goodbye

The **baseball** sat on her nightstand for three weeks after the funeral. A minor league souvenir from 1997, signed by someone whose name had faded into a illegible scrawl. It was the first thing Marcus had ever given her—a joke, really, because she hated sports. He called it his **vitamin** for her cynicism. "Take one daily," he'd said, pressing the ball into her hand with that maddening grin that always made her forgive him.

Now she rolled it between her palms, the raised seams leaving temporary tattoos on her skin. The hospice nurse had said the end was coming. Marcus's breathing had changed—shallow, rhythmic, like waves retreating from a shore he'd never visit again. His hand lay limp on the sheet, and when she pressed her **palm** against his, the warmth was already leaving him, migrating elsewhere.

"Remember that cat?" he whispered, eyes closed. "The one that brought us dead birds?"

She laughed through the tightening in her throat. The cat had been their first compromise. She'd wanted independence; he'd wanted domesticity. The orange tomcat delivered shrews to their doorstep with the pride of a tiny hunter, judging them both. It had slept between them in bed for eleven years, a furry wall of territorial grievance, until kidney disease took it three months before the cancer took Marcus.

"Stupid cat," she said.

"Best thing we ever did," Marcus murmured, and then the monitor began its insistent chorus.

The **baseball** stayed on the nightstand for three more years. Eventually she met someone—a woman who didn't make jokes, who organized her **vitamins** in those plastic daily compartments, who never asked about the signed ball gathering dust on the shelf. Sometimes, in the quiet hours before dawn, she would press her **palm** against the ball's surface and feel the ghost of those seams, those temporary tattoos that had lasted longer than the marriage itself. The cat's memory had faded, but the orange fur still sometimes appeared in dreams, delivering impossible gifts to a doorway that no longer existed.

She kept the ball. Some vitamins you take daily, even after you've stopped believing in their power.