The Seventh Inning Stretch

The dog — a golden retriever named Maple who belonged to the couple in apartment 4B — was the only one who saw him cry. It was just a single tear, tracking through the dust on his cheek as he sat on the fire escape, three stories above Brooklyn. The tear fell onto the baseball cap in his hands, a faded Mets cap that Elena had bought him at a thrift store on their first anniversary. She'd been dead six months tomorrow.

His iphone buzzed in his pocket — a reminder from work about the quarterly review he was definitely going to miss. Marcus had been covering for him since the funeral, but even his patience had limits. David could feel his career unraveling like a bad pitch, slow and inevitable and painful to watch. He'd worked twelve years to get to senior analyst, and now he couldn't remember the last time he'd opened his laptop.

"Hey," said a voice from below. Sarah from 3A was standing on the pavement, walking her own dog — some anxious terrier mix that yipped at everything. She was wearing his baseball cap, the one he'd thought he'd lost on the subway three weeks ago. The one Elena had given him.

"You dropped this," she called up. "I've been meaning to return it."

David stared. The absurdity of it hit him like a physical thing — that his dead wife's gift had been living downstairs this whole time, that this woman he'd exchanged nods with for three years had been wearing his grief, carrying it around the neighborhood while he sat alone on his fire escape letting his career dissolve.

"Keep it," he said. "It looks better on you."

She tilted her head, studying him. Then she climbed the fire escape stairs, sat next to him, and handed him the cap anyway. Their shoulders touched. Her dog curled up with Maple. Below them, the city hummed with all the people who weren't falling apart, who weren't mourning, who were just living their ordinary, beautiful lives.

"I make excellent mac and cheese," Sarah said. "And my couch is more comfortable than a fire escape."

David looked at the baseball cap in his hands, then at her, then at the two dogs sleeping together in the gathering dusk. Something in his chest — something that had been frozen since October — began to thaw.

"I'd like that," he said.