The Ripening

Grace stood at the kitchen counter, knife sinking into the papaya's flesh like an accusation. The fruit was overripe—soft spots blooming across its yellow skin like bruises, or maybe like memory.

"Baseball's on," David called from the living room. His voice had that particular flatness it acquired around six p.m. every weekday, as if someone had reached inside him and dialed down his vitality.

She kept cutting. Seeds slid into the bowl with wet little sounds.

In the reflection of the microwave door, she caught sight of her hair. There was more silver now than when David had commented on it two weeks ago—had it really been just two weeks?—at his brother's wedding. He'd touched the strand at her temple and said, "You look distinguished, Grace," which was the kind of word people used when they stopped seeing you as a woman and started seeing you as a person's wife, a mother, something that had served its purpose and was now settling into comfortable obsolescence.

They'd gone to Hawaii for their tenth anniversary. She'd eaten papaya every morning, sweet and perfect, while David read emails on his phone.

That was four years ago.

She carried the bowl to the living room. David was watching the game, some team in red uniforms swinging at balls they couldn't quite hit, symbolic in a way that made her chest hurt.

"Grace," he said, without turning. "Your hair looks different today."

"It's the lighting."

"No. It's—" He gestured vaguely at his own temple. "There's more silver."

She sat beside him on the couch, not touching him. The papaya was too sweet, almost fermenting. On screen, a player missed the ball entirely.

"We used to play catch," David said suddenly. "Remember? In that apartment on 4th Street."

"Before we became these people," she said.

"What?"

She looked at him really looked. At the slackness of his mouth, at the way his eyes stayed on the television even as he spoke to her. They were both forty-two. They owned a home with a mortgage they could afford and a life they'd chosen, except somehow choosing had turned into something else—into waking up every morning and performing the actions that reasonable adults performed, into moving through days that blurred together, into eating fruit that was nearly past its prime and pretending it was just as good as it would have been yesterday.

"Nothing," she said. "Want some papaya?"

He took a piece without looking, chewed without tasting.

"It's good," he said.

Grace took a piece herself. It had that faint funk of something beginning to rot. "Yes," she said. "It's good."