Three Strikes at Memory's Door

The urn was smaller than I expected. Ceramic blue, like something you'd keep a goldfish in, except this held what remained of Daniel instead.

I hadn't seen Julie since the funeral. She stood across the room at his memorial, her hair chopped short—a bob that made her look like a stranger. The long dark curls I'd run my fingers through during those months we pretended we were just friends were gone. Daniel had loved her hair. He'd say it made her look like a movie star from the seventies, all tousled glamour and cigarette smoke.

She caught my eye and I looked away, studying the baseball on the mantle. Daniel's prize possession, signed by some minor leaguer who'd washed out before making the majors. He'd bought it at a pawn shop and told everyone it was authentic. That was Daniel—always curating his own mythology, always three steps ahead of the truth.

'You're staring at it like it's going to tell you something,' Julie said, suddenly beside me. She smelled like gin and something floral, maybe gardenias. Expensive.

'He lied about it,' I said. 'The signature. It's fake.'

She laughed, and it sounded like glass breaking. 'Everything about Daniel was fake. That was the point.' She touched my arm, her fingers cold. 'Even us.'

The air between us thickened. Six years of something we never named, something that had survived his marriage to her, his relapse, his diagnosis. Something that had died with him last Tuesday in a motel room outside Tulsa.

'The goldfish,' she said abruptly. 'You know what happened to it?'

'No.'

'Me neither.' She turned to face me, and for the first time I saw the gray in her hair, the lines around her eyes. 'We kept it for weeks after he died the first time. That time he overdosed and came back. Then one morning it was just—floating. Like it knew.'

I thought about the baseball again, about how Daniel had taught me to pitch in the park behind his house when I was twelve and he was already drinking stolen beer from a paper bag. About how he'd saved my life that summer, and how I'd spent twenty years trying to return the favor.

'Some things,' I said, 'don't come back.'

'No,' she said, and she was crying, messy and honest. 'They don't.'

I held her while the sun went down, and it felt like the end of a very long game. Nobody won. We'd just played until we couldn't stand anymore.