The Physics of Catch

Margot left on a Tuesday, taking the good dishes and leaving behind Charlie, an aging golden retriever with hips that clicked like a metronome counting down to something neither of them wanted to name. That was three months ago. Now David's evenings consisted of throwing a baseball against the garage siding until the rhythm of it—thud, catch, thud, catch—drowned out the silence of the house she'd emptied.

He'd started taking vitamin D supplements because the doctor said his bones were becoming porous, the kind of fragility that snuck up on men his age. His father had died at fifty-two, collapsed on a softball field somewhere in Ohio while sliding into home. David was forty-nine. The arithmetic felt less like mathematics and more like a threat.

The dog appeared at his feet, nudging his shin with a wet nose. Charlie hadn't been the same since Margot left. Animals noticed absence in a way that felt accusatory. David sighed, creaking when he stood—the sound of his own joints making him wonder if he was the one aging backwards, becoming infant again, toward a different kind of silence.

"Hungry, buddy?"

He heated frozen spinach in the microwave because it was healthy, because he was trying, because the empty side of the mattress whispered that he'd let himself go. The spinach smelled like wet earth and guilt. He mixed it with kibble for Charlie, watched the dog eat with the enthusiasm David couldn't summon for anything anymore.

Outside, the baseball sat in the grass where he'd left it. His father had taught him to throw. They'd played catch until the streetlights came on, until his mother called them in for dinner, until the year his father stopped coming outside and started drinking his evenings instead. Some legacies were circles that couldn't be squared.

David picked up the ball. He wanted to call Margot. He wanted to tell her about the vitamins, about Charlie's clicking hips, about how the house felt like a stage set after the production closed. Instead he threw the ball high and hard, watching it arc against the bruised purple sky, a perfect parabola heading nowhere, caught only by gravity and the waiting ground.