The Papaya Incident

The cable guy arrived twenty minutes late, which should have been my first warning. Not that I had anywhere to be—Tuesday afternoons were for lying on the couch contemplating my failed marriage and eating papaya with a spoon directly from the skin. The fruit had become a weird obsession since Paul left, bright orange flesh that tasted like summer and looked like something you'd find at a crime scene.

"Cable's shot," the guy said, crouching behind my TV. He was twenty-five, easy. The kind of age where you still think cable packages matter. "You need the whole upgrade."

I watched his bull skull tattoo flex as he worked. Paul had tattoos like that. Paul had a lot of things like that—confidence, conviction, a worldview that fit together like puzzle pieces instead of mine, which were scattered across the floor like cat toys.

Speaking of which, Luna chose that moment to jump onto the entertainment center and knock over Paul's favorite whiskey glass. It hadn't moved since he'd left. The cat looked at me with those judgmental yellow eyes, as if to say: this man is touching your cables and you're thinking about your ex-husband.

"You have a pool?" the cable guy asked, gesturing toward the sliding door.

"Yeah."

"Nice. Me and my girl been talking about getting a house with a pool."

We walked outside. The pool was covered, leaves gathering in the corners like dead ideas. I'd meant to clean it since October.

"I used to swim every morning," I heard myself saying. "Then I got busy. Then I got sad. Then I got busy being sad."

He nodded, like this made sense. "My mom was like that after my dad died. She'd just sit. Said moving felt like giving in to the new normal."

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter through the open door, oxidizing in the air. Something about that fruit—how it went from bright orange to brown so quickly, how you had to eat it at exactly the right moment or you missed it entirely.

"You know what?" I said. "Forget the cable upgrade. Just fix what's broken."

"You sure? The upgrade's got—"

"I'm sure."

Luna rubbed against my leg as he packed up. I paid him and watched his truck pull away, then walked to the kitchen and finished the papaya, standing at the counter while the sun went down. Tomorrow I'd uncover the pool. Tomorrow I'd call my mother. Tomorrow was going to be different. But tonight, I let myself be exactly who I was: a woman eating fruit in the dark, learning how to be alone with herself for the first time in twenty years.