The Things We Keep

The baseball card collection sat in the bottom of the cardboard box, exactly where David had left it twenty years ago. He'd spent his childhood summers trading cards with Tommy at the corner store, memorizing batting averages before he knew what algebra was. Now his parents' house was being sold, and here he was, thirty-eight and still not sure what he was doing with his life.

His phone buzzed on the hardwood floor. Sarah again.

"I know you're ignoring me," her text read. "We need to talk about the divorce papers."

David set the phone face down and reached for another stack of photographs. His mother had labeled everything in her neat, careful handwriting. There was David as a toddler, buried in sand. David at his first communion. David and Sarah on their wedding day, her palm resting against his cheek like she was memorizing his face.

That was three years ago. Before she found the messages. Before he slept with his coworker and ruined everything.

A cat scratched at the back door. One of his mother's strays—she'd been feeding them for years despite his father's protests. David let it in. It was orange, with one ear notched from some fight he'd rather not imagine. The cat wound through his legs, purring like a small motor.

"You and me both," David said.

Outside, beyond the screened porch, a fox trotted across the lawn. It paused near the old oak tree where Tommy and David had buried a time capsule—mostly baseball cards and a letter neither of them had ever bothered to dig up. The fox looked directly at him through the screen, amber eyes unblinking, then slipped into the woods behind the property.

Sarah used to call him fox when they first met. He'd thought it was endearing. Later, he realized she meant something else entirely.

His phone buzzed again. This time he picked it up.

"I'm signing the papers," Sarah's text said. "Whatever happens next, I hope you figure out why you keep sabotaging everything good."

David sat among his childhood things, the orange cat curled beside him, and understood suddenly that some cards you never get to trade. Some games you play your whole life without ever learning the rules. Outside, the palm fronds rustled in the evening wind, and for the first time in years, he let himself cry.