Three Strikes at Sunset

The palm tree outside our bedroom window had died sometime during the winter, its fronds turned to brittle skeletons that rattled against the glass like dried bones. I stood watching it, Nate's baseball glove still on my hand - the leather soft from years of his sweat, the pocket shaped to fingers I hadn't held in months.

He'd left for work two hours ago, but his side of the bed remained unmade, sheets twisted around the pillow where his head should've rested. We'd stopped pretending somewhere around the time I stopped asking why he came home smelling like her perfume. Subtle as a fox, he'd thought. But foxes leave tracks, and I'd been following his for weeks through credit card statements and late-night texts.

The palm reader in Santa Monica had told me my life line would fork at forty-two. Two paths, she'd said, tracing the crease in my hand with a nicotine-stained fingernail. One road leads to everything you've built, the other to everything you've denied yourself. I was thirty then, secure in my marriage, certain the choice would be obvious when it came.

Now, standing in our bedroom with my husband's glove on my hand and the dead palm scratching against the window, I understood what she meant. The life we'd built was a house of cards held together by routine and cowardice. And what had I denied? The wild, sharp-toothed parts of myself that I'd traded for security.

Nate had played baseball in college - third base, quick hands, quicker temper. He kept his old jersey in the back of the closet, number 23 faded but visible. I'd found it last week, pressed against a box of things she'd left behind - a paperback with her name inside, a hair tie, receipts from dinners I hadn't attended. The evidence had been there all along, scattered like DNA at a crime scene, and I'd simply refused to see it.

The fox that lived in the ravine behind our subdivision had been screaming all night. Mating season, the neighbors said. But lying awake beside Nate's sleeping form, I'd recognized the sound for what it was: hunger, raw and unapologetic. Something inside me answered it.

I pulled the glove off my hand and set it on the bed, exactly where he'd left it this morning. Then I walked to the closet and found his old jersey, buried beneath her things. The fabric smelled of cedar and old sweat, of a time when he loved something - baseball, me, something - with his whole chest.

Outside, the wind caught the dead palm fronds and one finally snapped free, tumbling toward the ground like a bird that had forgotten how to fly. I watched it fall through the morning light, spinning and spiraling toward the earth, and somewhere in the distance, I heard the crack of a baseball hitting a bat - sharp and clean and absolutely certain.

Three strikes, I thought. We'd both struck out swinging.