The Thing About Foxes

The spinach in our garden had bolted—bitter and gone to seed, much like us, I thought, watching Daniel from the kitchen window. His hair was thinner than when we'd bought this house seven years ago, thinned by stress and time, though he was still handsome in that way that made strangers look twice.

He was in the backyard with a baseball, throwing it against the oak tree. Thunk. Thunk. A sound that had become the soundtrack to our decline. It was how he processed things—the same way his father had, the same way men in his family had processed things for generations.

I remembered the fox we'd seen last autumn, a sleek rust-colored thing that had slipped through our fence like a secret. We'd watched it together from this window, breathless, until Daniel had whispered, "They're monogamous, you know. For life." He'd squeezed my shoulder then, and I'd felt something crack open inside me—a tenderness so sharp it had brought tears to my eyes.

Now I stood with a glass of water, watching him throw. The water sloshed against the glass, rhythmic as his throwing. Thunk. Slosh. Thunk. Slosh.

"You're going to put a dent in that tree," I said when he finally came inside, smelling of sweat and cut grass and the particular loneliness of men who can't speak what they feel.

"It's just a tree, Sarah."

"It's not just a tree. Nothing is just anything anymore."

He washed his hands at the sink, water running while he scrubbed at nothing. I thought about the fox again, how it had returned each night for weeks, how we'd left out scraps for it, how we'd named him Rusty and felt like we were sharing something private in the sharing of him. Then one day he'd stopped coming. Just like that.

"The spinach is done for," I said. "We should pull it up."

Daniel turned off the water. Drops fell from his hands like unspoken things. "I'll do it tomorrow."

"You always say tomorrow."

"Sarah." His voice cracked. "Just—not tonight. Please."

I watched him walk away, the baseball still in his pocket, and realized that some things, like foxes and love, don't always announce when they're leaving. They just slip through the fence, one night, and don't come back.