The Seventh Inning Stretch

The cemetery was empty except for me and a scattering of dried leaves across Arthur's grave. He would've hated it here. Arthur hated anything that kept him from moving, from being. That's why we played baseball every Sunday for fifteen years—not well, never well—but religiously, as if the dirt infield was our church and the cracked bats our prayer books.

I hadn't been a good friend. Not at the end. When the cancer came, fast and vicious, I'd stayed away. Couldn't bear to watch him waste away. Could barely bear to look at myself in the mirror, knowing what a coward I was. So I'd sent flowers. Texted. Made excuses about work, about my marriage falling apart, about anything other than the truth—that Arthur had always been the brave one, and I was just the guy who happened to play outfield beside him.

The baseball glove in my hand felt foreign now. Arthur's old Rawlings, the one he'd insisted I take. "Got nobody else to give it to," he'd said, three weeks before he died. I'd mumbled something inadequate and tucked it in my closet like a shameful secret.

But here I was. Standing over his grave with his glove, feeling like an idiot, feeling like the world's biggest asshole.

"Hey," I said to the headstone. "Got called up for the company softball team. Can you believe that shit? Me?" I let out a dry laugh. "They put me in right field. Like riding a bike, Arth. Like riding a damn bike."

I crouched down and placed the glove on his grave. Something broke open inside me—something that had been calcified for months.

"I should've come sooner. I should've sat with you. I should've been your friend."

The wind picked up, scattering more leaves, and for a second, just a second, I could almost hear him. Not in a mystical way, nothing cheap like that. Just in memory. The way he'd laugh when I struck out swinging. The way he'd say, "Next time, kid. Next time."

Next time. There was no next time. There was only now, and the weight of things left unsaid, and the long walk back to my car.

I stood up, knees aching in the cold. "Love you, man," I said to the stone. Then I turned and walked away, bearing it like a wound that finally, finally, had begun to heal.