The Seventh Inning Stretch

The orange peel lay on the stadium seat between them, a bright wound against the gray plastic. Elena hadn't eaten it. She'd just peeled it, methodically, watching the sections separate while the bottom of the ninth inning collapsed around them.

"You're doing that thing," Marco said.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you're somewhere else. Like you're waiting for something to end so you can start living."

The crowd erupted as a baseball sailed into the stands. A father and daughter high-fived two rows down. The daughter was maybe eight, wearing an oversized jersey that swallowed her small frame. Elena remembered her own father at that age—how he'd called her "his little bear" because she'd growl at anyone who tried to hug her goodbye. The bear tattoo on her shoulder twinged, a phantom itch from the needle she'd sat through three weeks ago, on the day she decided she was done being someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone who waited.

"I'm not waiting," she said. "I'm already here."

Marco laughed bitterly. "Are you? Because it feels like you've been packing for months and nobody told me."

The truth was, she had been packing. Not boxes—those were easy. She'd been packing away pieces of herself, folding them neatly into corners where they wouldn't show. The part that hated his mother's casual racism. The part that missed her studio apartment, the one with the bad heating and perfect light. The part that had stopped wanting children somewhere around year three, when she realized Marco wanted them because he thought that's what you did.

"The orange," she said suddenly. "Why did you buy it?"

"What?"

"At the concession stand. They had pretzels, beer, cracker jack. You came back with an orange. Since when do you eat oranges at baseball games?"

Marco stared at her. His face did that thing it had started doing lately—cracking open, revealing something frightened underneath. "I don't know. I saw it and thought of you. Your mother used to keep a bowl of them on the table. Remember?"

Elena remembered. Her mother had been dead seven years, and somehow Marco remembered the oranges but not the way Elena had cried for three weeks straight, how she'd begged him to just hold her, how he'd said they needed to be strong and move forward.

The scoreboard flickered. FINAL: 4-3. People began filing toward the exits.

"I bought it," Marco said quietly, "because it was the only thing there that was alive. Everything else was processed. Frozen. Dead. I thought... I don't know what I thought."

Elena picked up a section of the orange. She could feel the juice under her thumbnail, could smell the bright, violent scent of it. She could be angry. She could pack tonight. She could tell him about the other apartment, the one she'd put a deposit on last Tuesday.

Instead, she ate the orange. It was impossibly sweet, almost painfully so, and when Marco reached for a section, she didn't pull away.

"We need to talk," she said.

"I know."

The stadium lights flickered off, plunging them into twilight. For a moment, they were just two people in the dark, sticky with juice and the things they hadn't said.