What We Don't Say

The spinach in Sarah's teeth had been there for twenty minutes. David saw it when she laughed at Greg's joke about the quarterly report—a nervous, musical sound that used to make him fall in love with her. Now it just made him tired. He watched the green fleck caught between her canine and premolar, a tiny flag of surrender.

They were at the community center, the annual department picnic. The air smelled of chlorine from the indoor pool and charcoal smoke. David's shirt clung to his back, damp with a sweat that had nothing to do with the heat. He felt like he was swimming, not toward anything, just in place, suspended in water too deep to stand in but too shallow to drown in properly.

"You gonna sign up for the baseball league?" Greg asked, slapping David on the back. Greg was twenty-four, wore his hair in a messy man-bun, and used words like "synergy" without irony. He was everything David used to be before the mortgage and the fertility treatments and the nights Sarah spent crying in the bathroom.

"Maybe," David said. He hadn't played since college. He remembered the clean crack of the bat, the way time seemed to slow between pitch and swing. He didn't tell Greg that he'd rather slit his wrists than spend his Tuesday nights chasing balls he couldn't catch anymore.

Sarah's phone buzzed. She glanced at it, then away, then back again. A fox-like smile played at her lips—quick, clever, hiding something. David knew that smile. He'd seen it three months ago when she started working late. He'd seen it when she came home smelling of someone else's cologne, faint and expensive.

"Work," she said, but she didn't check the message.

The spinach was still there. David thought about telling her, about reaching across the table and using his thumb to wipe it away like he used to do. Instead he watched her watch the phone, waiting for it to light up again. He thought about baseball, about how the game ended after nine innings whether you wanted it to or not. He thought about swimming lessons as a kid, how his mother told him sometimes you had to stop fighting the water and just let yourself float.

"David?" Sarah's voice was soft. She'd noticed him watching her. The spinach caught the light when she turned.

"You have something in your teeth," he said.

She laughed, that same musical sound. He watched her hand rise to her mouth, watched her fingers find the spinach and remove it. She didn't look embarrassed. She looked relieved, as if he'd given her permission to finally notice something that had been there all along.