What Remains Unsaid

Elena stood in the kitchen at 11:47 PM, the refrigerator's hum her only company. On the counter, a papaya she'd bought three days ago had finally softened, its skin speckled like a bruised sunset. David had loved papaya—hadn't they bought their first one together in that overpriced market in Chelsea, back when they believed wholeheartedly in the myth of New York as a place where people like them could become someone else?

She reached for the spinach wilting in the crisper drawer. Every Tuesday for six years, she'd made David's favorite salad—baby spinach, walnuts, goat cheese, balsamic. Even after he moved out two months ago, she kept buying spinach. The habit was harder to break than the marriage.

The TV in the living room flickered without sound, bathed in the blue light of late-night infomercials. She'd meant to call the cable company since the service started cutting out during storms, but that would require being present on a weekday between 8 AM and 6 PM. It would require having a life that accommodated such things.

Her phone lit up on the counter. David's name.

She answered before she could think better of it. "Hello?"

"I'm at the bodega on 7th," he said. "They have those papayas you like. The ones from the stand near our—near your old place."

"I don't live anywhere else, David."

"Right. Sorry. I just—I saw them and thought of you."

The silence stretched between them, taut and trembling, a cable fraying at both ends. Somewhere in the space between his mouthpiece and her ear, words were traveling that neither of them knew how to say anymore.

"How's work?" she asked, because asking how he was felt too dangerous.

"Same. You know. The merger's still happening. Or not happening. It's all very corporate." He paused. "Are you eating? You were always forgetting to eat when you worked late."

Elena looked at the spinach in her hand, at the papaya on the counter, at the life she was building from the fragments of the one they'd shared. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm making that salad. The spinach one."

"Oh." His voice softened. "Good. That's—that's good, El."

"David?"

"Yeah?"

"Why did you call?"

He didn't answer immediately. She could hear traffic in the background, could imagine him standing on that sidewalk in the cold, holding a papaya that was probably already beginning to bruise, realizing that some gestures are both too much and not enough.

"I don't know," he said finally. "I guess I just wanted to know you were still there."

"I'm here," she said. "I've always been here."

"Right," he said. "Of course. Well. Goodnight, Elena."

"Goodnight, David."

She set the phone on the counter and cut into the papaya. It was perfectly ripe, sweet and faintly musky, the flesh the color of something remembered. She would eat it with her spinach salad, she decided, and tomorrow she would call the cable company, and maybe the next day she would stop buying spinach every Tuesday. Not because David was gone, but because she was learning to feed herself.