The Seventh Inning Stretch

The chemotherapy had started taking Sarah's hair two weeks ago—first in wisps around the pillowcase, then in clumps that clogged the shower drain. She'd finally made Tom shave it all off yesterday. He'd done it with shaking hands, kissing her bare scalp afterward, telling her she looked like a fierce beautiful alien queen. She'd cried anyway.

Now they sat in the bleachers, watching their son Liam's Little League game. The October sun painted everything in bruised shades of apricot and burnt umber. Sarah kept her baseball cap pulled low.

"Strike three!" the umpire shouted, and Liam trudged back to the dugout, kicking at the dirt.

"He's too hard on himself," Tom said, squeezing Sarah's hand. His palm was sweating. She wondered if he was thinking about the MRI results from yesterday, the ones they'd get tomorrow morning. Whether the tumors had shrunk or spread or stayed stubbornly the same.

"He's twelve," Sarah said. "Everything's the end of the world."

Tom pulled something from his jacket pocket and pressed it into her hand. An orange. He'd been carrying it around like a worry stone since her diagnosis—her favorite fruit, though she hadn't been able to keep much down lately. The skin was already bruised from his thumb.

"In case you get hungry," he said, not meeting her eyes.

Sarah stared at that stupid orange, this small desperate gesture, and suddenly she was laughing—really laughing—for the first time in months. Tom joined in, this cracked confused sound, and then they were both holding each other up in the plastic seats, weeping and laughing while the other parents politely pretended not to notice.

Liam hit a double his next at-bat. He rounded first base pumping his fist, and Sarah thought: maybe that's all you could do. Keep stepping up to the plate. Keep swinging. Let yourself be absurdly, inexplicably happy sometimes, even with everything hanging in the balance.

She peeled the orange right there in the stands, letting the juice run down her fingers, sticky and sweet and terribly alive, feeding a piece to Tom and then eating one herself, cap still pulled low over her naked head, not caring who saw.