The Papaya Summer

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter, its green-yellow skin mocking me. Too ripe, like everything else that summer. Carlos had brought it over three days ago, grinning with that boyish charm that made me forget I was thirty-six, not twenty-three. 'Exotic,' he'd called it, like he called our late-night conversations, like he called whatever this was between us.

I sliced into it now, the knife sliding through flesh that smelled faintly of musk and sweetness. We were supposed to share it after the baseball game — his minor league team, the one he'd quit his corporate job to play for. I'd sat in the stands, surrounded by families and drunk college kids, watching him chase a dream I'd been too cowardly to pursue myself.

'Spinach again?' Sarah had asked at dinner, eyeing my salad. My best friend since college, she saw everything I refused to acknowledge. 'You know what they say about eating your feelings.' She didn't know about the papaya. She didn't know about the nights Carlos showed up at my door after games, smelling of sweat and cheap beer, talking about his ex-wife like she was a ghost haunting both of us.

The phone rang. Sarah. 'He's in the hospital,' she said. 'Car accident. He was out running.'

I drove to the hospital, the papaya forgotten on the counter. The waiting room smelled of antiseptic and coffee. When they finally let me see him, Carlos was unconscious, tubes and wires making him look smaller than the man who'd stood in my kitchen declaring he was done living someone else's life.

He died two days later.

Now I stand at his grave, the sprinklers spraying water onto the freshly turned earth. Sarah grips my arm, her presence steady and familiar. I think about the papaya rotting on my counter, about the baseball cap he gave me that still smells of him, about all the words we never said because timing is a coward's excuse.

'So,' Sarah says softly. 'What happens now?'

I watch the water create mud around the headstone. 'I think,' I say, 'I finally stop waiting for permission to live.'