The Seventh Inning Stretch

Elena placed the amber **vitamin** bottle on the nightstand, its contents rattling like dried bones in a hollow shell. Three months post-chemo, and she still couldn't remember which days required which supplements. David had always handled the pills—their orderly arrangement in his weekly organizer, his gentle reminders, the way his warm hand would guide the glass to her lips.

Now the organizer sat empty in the drawer, next to his **baseball** cap from that minor league game they'd attended on their first anniversary. She remembered the crack of the bat, the smell of cheap beer and funnel cake, how David had inexplicably caught a foul ball with one hand while balancing two sodas in the other. He'd given it to a crying kid in the row ahead, then turned to her with that crooked grin that made her stomach do things it hadn't done in years, even then.

The hospital had given her paperwork about nutrition, about rebuilding, about all the things she should have been doing all along. She bought **orange** juice by the gallon—pulp-free, because David had hated pulp—and drank it standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the backyard where he'd promised to build her a garden. Never happened. Too busy dying.

Her sister called this evening. "You should date, El."

"I'm fifty-two, Sarah."

"Exactly. You've got time."

Elena had hung up without mentioning the vitamins, or how she still set the table for two sometimes, or how the baseball cap smelled faintly of his hair gel after all these months. She'd stood in the bathroom, staring at her reflection—thinner now, grayer, the scars from her port barely visible beneath the collar of her shirt.

She uncapped the vitamin bottle. The routine had become a kind of prayer, though she wasn't sure who she was praying to anymore. Some days she believed in the science of it—the careful chemistry of healing. Other days she suspected it was all just placebo, like the way she still wore his old sweaters or bought his favorite cereal, as if somehow these small rituals could stitch together the tear in the fabric of her life.

Outside, an orange sunset bled into the horizon, the kind of evening that made her chest ache with something too big for words. She swallowed the pills dry, no water, no David to remind her. Then she picked up the baseball cap, held it to her face, and breathed in the ghost of him.

Tomorrow she would call her sister back. Tomorrow she would maybe buy different juice. But tonight, she sat in the dark, learning how to be alive in a world that kept moving forward without asking permission.