The Papaya Summer

Mara sat on the porch of the rental house, watching the storm roll in across the water. She'd done what everyone said not to do at forty-two: left the marriage, the corporate job, the life that looked perfect on paper. Now she was three months into a sabbatical that felt less like freedom and more like unmooring.

The cable guy had come yesterday to install internet, but she'd sent him away. She wanted the quiet. Wanted not to know who was president or what her ex-husband's new girlfriend looked like or that her former best friend Elena had just gotten engaged to the man Mara had introduced her to.

A papaya sat on the wooden table before her, overripe and weeping golden juice onto the weathered planks. Elena had loved papaya—cut it open, squeezed lime over it, eaten it with her fingers while they sat on Mara's fire escape in their twenties, talking about the men they'd marry, the lives they'd live. The men they'd marry. She'd almost gotten it right.

Lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the bay like a strobe. In that frozen second, Mara saw it all: Elena's face at the wedding reception last year, glassy with champagne and something like apology. The phone call three days later. I never meant for this to happen. We're adults, can't we—

They could not.

Thunder arrived seconds later, shaking the floorboards beneath her bare feet. Rain began to fall, hard and sudden. Mara didn't move. She picked up the papaya, split it open with her thumb. It was too soft, fermenting at the edges, sweet and wrong. Like everything that stays past its time.

She ate it anyway, standing in the downpour, letting the storm wash the stickiness from her hands. Tomorrow she'd call the cable company. Tomorrow she'd figure out what forty-two looked like when you had to build it from scratch. But tonight, she stood in the rain and tasted the things she'd lost, and let herself miss them.