What the Bull Knew

Mara stood in the supermarket aisle, weeping over a papaya. At forty-seven, she'd expected to have mastered something—grief, certainly. That was supposed to be old news. But here she was, three years after David's death, undone by tropical fruit because it was the first thing he'd ever cooked for her, halved and filled with lime, their third date arranged around it like a promise.

"You okay?" A man asked. Not young, not old. His face had the kind of worn quality that suggested he'd seen things.

"Fine," she said. "Just remembering."

"The worst ones do that."

His name was Ellis. He'd been a commodities trader—cattle futures, he'd said, bull markets and bear markets, though the bulls had always been his specialty. "You learn to read them," he told her over coffee that turned into dinner, turned into six months of Sunday mornings. "The way they hold their heads, set their hooves. They'll tell you everything if you pay attention."

Mara had always been terrible at reading anything. She'd missed the signs of David's declining health—the fatigue, the weight loss—until the diagnosis landed like a verdict. She'd missed the signs of her own unraveling until her therapist gently suggested she might want to consider whether she was still, strictly speaking, employed.

But Ellis read things. He read the hesitation in her voice when she mentioned her mother's house, still sitting full of her parents' things two years after their deaths. He read the way she ran her thumb over the worn spot on her grandmother's ring whenever she felt dishonest.

"Your father was a bull," Ellis said one night, looking at a photograph of her dad. "See how he's standing? Feet planted. Shoulders back. That's a bull who knows exactly how much space he takes up."

"He hated that photo," Mara said. "Said it made him look stubborn."

"Was he?"

"Impossibly."

Ellis nodded. "Good. Someone had to be."

Her cat, Baz, appeared from nowhere to wind around Ellis's legs. Baz was her father's cat, really—a barn cat who'd decided he preferred the screened porch and David's cooking. Baz had chosen them both, one by one, and now he'd chosen Ellis.

"That's the real test," Ellis said, scratching Baz behind the ears. "They know."

Mara watched them—Ellis with his commodity-market wisdom and his hands that had weathered three bankruptcies and one heart attack, Baz with his calculated affection, the papaya on the counter ripening quietly toward something sweet. She thought about all the signs she'd missed, all the futures she'd failed to read. Then she thought about the bulls Ellis had loved, the ones he said would tell you everything if you paid attention.

"What would a bull do?" she asked.

"Plant his feet," Ellis said. "Know exactly how much space he takes up."

Baz jumped into her lap. The papaya smelled like summer, like limes and second chances. For the first time in three years, Mara didn't feel like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. She felt like she was standing on ground that might actually hold her weight.

"Good," she said. "I think I'm ready to learn how to do that."