The Orange Seat

Eddie had been coming to Section 214, Row K, Seat 12 for seventeen years. Not seat 11—seat 11 was where Sarah sat, wearing that bright orange windbreaker she'd bought at a thrift shop in 2008, the year they both got laid off from the same accounting firm on the same day.

Now she was gone. Three years, seven months, and four days gone. And the seat beside him remained empty, season after season, while he sat alone in his increasingly empty house, eating orange slices at the seventh inning stretch because she'd always packed them in Tupperware, and some habits you just couldn't break, even after the divorce papers were signed and she'd moved to Portland with someone named Kevin who probably appreciated her in ways Eddie never had.

Tonight's game was dragging into extra innings, and the sky above the stadium was bruising purple, thick with storm clouds the weathermen had been threatening all week. The crowd thinned as the tenth inning stretched on, families leaving to beat the rain, but Eddie stayed. He'd paid for the seat. He'd use it.

The first bolt of lightning split the sky just as their batter stepped to the plate—a jagged white scar across the darkness, followed immediately by thunder that shook the stadium's foundations. The umpire waved the players off the field. Rain delay.

Eddie didn't move. He watched the grounds crew rush onto the field, pulling the tarp across the diamond, that massive orange sheet like some synthetic ocean rolling over the carefully tended grass. And suddenly he was crying, not because Sarah had left, not because the house was so quiet, not because he'd wasted decades playing it safe, but because he'd never once, in seventeen years of marriage, told her that he actually hated baseball, that he'd only gone because she'd loved it, that he'd sat through hundreds of games watching her face light up while he checked his watch and wondered why he couldn't just be content with a life that should have been enough.

The rain began to fall, slow at first, then harder, and Eddie sat there in Section 214, Row K, Seat 12, weeping openly as the storm finally broke, while somewhere in Portland, Sarah was probably falling asleep beside Kevin, who perhaps didn't like baseball either, or maybe loved it sincerely, unselfconsciously, the way she had, in that orange windbreaker that Eddie had secretly hated but worn once, just once, to make her laugh, during a rain delay much like this one, in a different lifetime, when they were young enough to think that love was about compromise, not the slow erosion of yourself into someone you no longer recognized.