The Weight of Things

The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand, orange plastic with a childproof cap that mocked him. D3, 5000 IU. She'd been dead three weeks and the bottle was still three-quarters full. He'd started taking them himself, as if her calcium deficiency could become his, as if swallowing one each morning might keep some part of her alive.

"You going to the baseball game Saturday?" asked Dave from the next cubicle, not looking up from his spreadsheet.

"Can't. Padel tournament."

"You and your rich people sports," Dave said. "Whatever gets you out of the house."

That was the thing about grief — everyone wanted you out of the house. As if leaving the apartment could change what had happened. As if the world outside would be different than the world inside, where her side of the bed still smelled like lavender and he still reached for her in his sleep.

The padel court was indoors, climate-controlled, walls of glass that reflected his own exhausted face back at him. His partner was some woman from his firm's litigation department, someone he'd exchanged hellos with for years without really seeing.

"You okay?" she asked, stretching against the wall. "You look like you're carrying a bear on your shoulders."

"Something like that."

They played in silence mostly, the rhythmic thwack of ball against racquet, the squeak of rubber on synthetic grass. She was good — precise, patient — and he found himself matching her energy, the game becoming a kind of meditation.

Afterward, they sat on the bench outside the court, both sweating, both breathing hard.

"My wife died," he heard himself say. "She made me promise to keep playing padel. Said I needed the exercise. Said I was going to die young like my father."

"That's brutal," she said, not offering platitudes. Just letting it sit there between them.

"I keep thinking about the last thing I said to her. I told her she was being dramatic about the vitamins. I told her she was obsessed with her health."

"She was right though. About the exercise, I mean. You're playing."

"I guess."

He put on his hat — an old baseball cap she'd bought him in Fenway Park, years ago. The brim was fraying at the edges. He should throw it away. Everything should be thrown away. The apartment was a museum exhibit of a life that no longer existed.

"Want to get a drink?" she asked. "I mean, if you're not rushing home to the apartment."

"I'm not rushing anywhere."

"Good," she said. "Neither am I."

And for the first time since she died, he didn't feel like he was carrying a bear on his shoulders. He felt like he might eventually learn how to put it down.