What the Palm Couldn't Hold

The papaya sat between us on the white tablecloth, its orange flesh gleaming like something we couldn't afford to say. Seven years together, and this was what we'd become: two people waiting for the other to speak first, while tropical fruit threatened to overripen in the humidity of a restaurant that had seen too many last dinners.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky—one, two, three flashes in rapid succession, like a heartbeat gone arrhythmic. The storm had been forecasted for days, much like what was happening between us. You could see these things coming if you paid attention.

"Remember Costa Rica?" Maya said, her knife hovering over the papaya's seeds. "When we ate this every morning for a month?"

I nodded. We'd been different people then. Or perhaps we'd just been better at pretending.

She reached across the table. Her palm—those familiar lines, that small scar from the cooking accident in year three—brushed against mine. The contact sent something through me, sharp and unwelcome. Not desire, but grief. Not even grief, really. Just the hollow recognition of something that had already died.

"The divorce papers came today," I said.

The lightning struck closer now, illuminating her face in stark relief. The lines around her eyes that I'd once found charming now looked like exhaustion. Or maybe that was just my own reflection I was seeing.

"I know," she said.

"You signed them?"

"I signed them."

Outside, the first heavy drops began to fall. People were scattering, running for cover, umbrellas blossoming like dark flowers. We stayed seated.

"So this is it, then," I said. "This dinner. This papaya."

"This is it."

She cut into the fruit. The knife made a sound like something ending.

"Do you hate me?" I asked, because somewhere in me, some stupid, selfish part still needed to know.

Maya looked up, and for a moment, I saw everything we'd been and everything we could have been, all the futures we'd pruned away with our small, daily failures of courage.

"No," she said finally. "That would be easier."

She lifted a piece of papaya to her lips. Outside, the sky broke open, and rain came down like the world was ending, which it wasn't. It was just a Tuesday. Just a marriage. Just the way things sometimes end without anyone being the villain.

I watched her eat. I thought about ordering another drink. I thought about Costa Rica, about how we'd stood on that beach and promised each other forever, as if forever was something we had the right to give.

The lightning flashed again. In that brief illumination, I saw that she was crying, or maybe that was just the rain on the window behind her, distorting everything the way it does.

I didn't ask. Some things, you finally learn, aren't yours to know anymore.