The Unfinished Game

Margaret stood at the kitchen counter, knife hovering over half a papaya. The flesh was impossibly orange, like something that shouldn't exist in this gray February light. David used to love papaya. He'd eat it with lime juice, laughing when the seeds stuck to his chin. Three years since the accident, and she still bought them out of habit.

"Mom?"

She turned. Leo stood in the doorway, already twenty-two and looking more like David every day. He held a plastic bag. "I'm heading out."

She remembered then—his first real job interview. "Did you eat? I can make eggs with spinach."

"Already ate."

He was lying. She could see it in the way his thumb rubbed against his wrist, David's nervous tic. The goldfish in the bowl on the windowsink did a lazy loop, oblivious to the silence stretching between them.

"You'll do great," she said, and meant it, even though her chest felt hollow.

The interview was for some corporate data entry position. "Like being a zombie," he'd joked last night, staring at the baseball game they'd both stopped watching. The home team was down by three runs in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded. Then David had appeared in her memory—how he'd taught Leo to hold a bat, how he'd missed every single one of Leo's actual games because of work. The irony had been cruel enough to make her laugh out loud. Leo had looked at her like she was losing it.

Maybe she was.

"Mom?" His voice was gentle now.

"Go," she said. "Crush it."

After he left, she sliced the papaya. The juice ran sticky-sweet over her fingers. She ate it standing at the sink, watching the goldfish swim in endless circles, and understood finally that grief wasn't something you moved past. You just learned to exist alongside it, like a roommate who never left.

The baseball game from last night had ended while they slept. She looked it up on her phone: bottom of the tenth, walk-off single. The team had won after all.

Some games just take longer than others, she thought, and washed her papaya-sticky hands in the cooling water.