What We Carry Home

The fluorescent lights hummed above him as David stood in the produce section at 11:47 PM, clutching a bag of organic spinach that had already started to wilt. His marriage had been wilting too—slower, but no less certain. He'd come for milk, maybe bread, but found himself here instead, surrounded by vegetables that would rot before he ate them.

"You look like a zombie," his wife had said that morning, her voice flat as she applied mascara in the bathroom mirror. She hadn't meant it as an insult. That was the problem. She'd stated it like fact: the weather was cold, the coffee was ready, he was a zombie now.

He dropped the spinach into his cart. Beside it, a single baseball from his son's Little League days rolled against the plastic mesh. Cody was twenty now, living in Portland, calling once a month. David had saved the baseball for reasons he couldn't articulate, something about holding onto a time when he'd been useful—when coaching first base and fixing broken zippers had been enough.

The automatic doors parted and a woman walked in. David watched her unzip her jacket, revealing a fox embroidered on her shirt. The animal's eyes were stitched in gold thread, watching him. His grandfather had hunted foxes in upstate New York, back when men still did those things, back when David's father had been young enough to trail behind, carrying the dead animals home.

He remembered sitting at his father's kitchen table last month, watching him struggle to open a water bottle. "Your mother's been gone three years," his father had said, not looking up from the bottle. "Some days I still expect her to walk in that door. Isn't that something?"

David had wanted to say something profound, something that would matter. But he'd only nodded, the way he nodded at work when his boss announced another restructuring, the way he nodded when Julie told him she was unhappy but wasn't leaving, not yet, she wasn't leaving yet.

Now he stood alone in the grocery store, surrounded by food he wouldn't eat, carrying things he couldn't use. His cart held rotting spinach and a ghost of a baseball and the knowledge that tomorrow he would wake up and do this again. Not the shopping. The rest of it. The waking up, the nodding, the becoming someone his younger self wouldn't recognize.

He left the cart near the registers and walked out into the cold night air, carrying nothing at all.