What We Keep

Maria found Rafa sitting on his mother's balcony, surrounded by amber bottles. The cancer had come back — this time in his liver — and he'd traded whiskey for vitamins somewhere between the diagnosis and the chemotherapy. He looked thinner, his skin taking on the same strange yellow tint as the sunset behind him.

"You came," he said, not looking up from his hands.

"I said I would."

She sat beside him, careful not to jostle the constellation of pill bottles spread across the small table. Vitamin C, D, B-complex, things she couldn't pronounce. He'd always believed in solutions you could swallow.

"My mother used to sit here," Rafa said suddenly. "Before she died. She'd read my palm and tell me I'd live to be eighty. See that line?" He held up his hand, palm toward her. "She said it meant longevity."

Maria looked at his hand — the same hand that had once held hers, the same hand that had pushed her away five years ago when she'd begged him to stop drinking. "She was wrong about a lot of things."

"She loved you, you know. Even after everything."

"After I told you to choose between me and the bottle, you mean."

"After you stopped visiting."

Silence stretched between them, thick and humid. A palm tree frond scraped against the railing above, a dry whisper.

Maria reached into her bag and pulled out the orange she'd bought at a market on the way. She peeled it slowly, the spray of citrus sharp in the heavy air. She'd always brought him oranges when he was sick — a childhood remedy from his grandmother that he'd never outgrown.

She held out a segment. He took it without speaking.

They ate the orange together, sticky juice on their fingers, the scent of it cutting through the medicinal smell of the balcony. When it was gone, Rafa wiped his hands on his shirt and looked at her for the first time.

"I never chose the bottle over you," he said quietly. "I just didn't know how to be the person you wanted me to be."

"I didn't want you to be someone else. I wanted you to stay."

"I'm staying now."

He gestured at the balcony, at the view of the ocean they could both see from where they sat. Water stretched to the horizon, flat and endless, catching the last of the light.

"For how long?" The question escaped before she could stop it.

Rafa smiled, almost laughed. "However long. She was wrong about the palm, Maria. But she was right about something else — she said you'd come back when it mattered."

She didn't tell him that she'd come back because it mattered. She didn't tell him that she'd spent five years waiting for this moment, for the chance to sit with him and eat oranges on a balcony while the sun went down.

Instead, she reached across the table and took his hand. His palm was warm against hers, the lines of it familiar as her own name. Beneath them, the bottles of vitamins stood in silent testimony to all the things they could not fix, all the time they could not recover.

But the orange scent lingered in the air between them, bright and sharp as hope. And the water beyond them kept reflecting the dying light, indifferent and eternal, as the first stars began to appear in the darkening sky.