The Seventh Inning Stretch

The orange slice sat on the dashboard, its flesh already browning where I'd squeezed it too hard. Three hours I'd been waiting in this parking lot, watching the baseball field through the chain-link fence, while inside the funeral home they said their final goodbyes to a man I'd stopped knowing years ago.

My hair — the chestnut waves he used to bury his face in, the ones he said smelled like summer — now fell in frayed knots past my shoulders. I hadn't cut it since he got sick. Some kind of penance, maybe. Or just another thing I couldn't bring myself to care about.

That's what happens when you spend three years as someone's caregiver. You become a zombie going through the motions: measuring medication, scheduling appointments, holding hands that grew more translucent by the week, until the person you were — the woman who laughed too loud and danced in grocery aisles — just... evaporated.

I watched the little league game through the fence. A boy in an orange jersey swung too hard, spun around, and fell on his ass. His teammates laughed. The kind of easy, unselfconscious joy I'd forgotten existed.

The baseball arced toward the sun, impossibly high, and for a second I saw it — the life I could have had if I'd walked away sooner. Instead I'd stayed, transforming from wife to nurse to ghost, piece by piece, while everyone told me how strong I was. How brave.

Strength is just endurance with better PR.

I ate the rest of the orange, bitter and sweet against my tongue. The funeral procession would start soon. I'd get in my car and follow the hearse and accept the casseroles and the murmured condolences from people who'd stopped visiting three months in.

But not yet. I needed one more minute sitting here in the parking lot, with baseball laughter in the distance and citrus on my fingers, before I went back to being the person everyone needed me to be.