The Seventh Inning Stretch

Mara found the cat on her fire escape three weeks after David's funeral, a mangy tabby with one ear that refused to stand at attention. She named him Baseball, because life had become a series of innings she couldn't seem to finish, each one bleeding into the next without resolution. Her therapist said grief was non-linear. Mara said grief was a Boston Red Sox game, extra innings, bottom of the ninth, and you were losing by twelve runs.

The hat was David's — a faded Red Sox cap he'd worn since college, the brim permanently curved to the shape of his forehead. She'd found it in the back of his closet while packing up his things, smelling faintly of his hair product and the cigarettes he'd quit five years ago. Her mother said she should donate it. Mara wore it to bed instead, until the sweatband stained her pillowcase with the ghost of him.

She was eating an orange at the kitchen counter when Baseball brushed against her ankle, purring like a small engine. The citrus scent hit her suddenly — David had always eaten oranges the same way, peeling them in one long spiral, the juice dripping down his wrists. She hadn't bought an orange since he died. Couldn't walk past them in the grocery store without her chest hollowing out.

Baseball jumped onto the counter and batted at the orange peel.

"You bastard," she said, and then she was laughing, really laughing, for the first time in months, because the cat was trying to eat David's orange, and David would have found this hilarious, would have made some terrible joke about sacrifice flies or base running.

She fed the cat a piece of orange. He turned up his nose and walked away.

Mara stood in her kitchen in her dead husband's hat, holding a half-eaten orange, while a cat named Baseball ignored her from the refrigerator top. And somehow, impossibly, she felt okay. Not good, never good again probably, but okay. The kind of okay that comes after extra innings, when you're exhausted and you've lost but you're still standing, and there's always tomorrow's game.