It was her fourth birthday without Ted, and she was getting better at forgetting him. She planned not to pick up. She planned to be busy. The three previous conversations had gone like this:

“I got you a present. It’s something you’ve always wanted.”

“Let me think. Is it a trip to Paris?” Alice would say.

“Better,” Ted would reply. “You’ll never guess. I can’t wait to see the look on your face.”

Alice would hug the phone to her ear. Listen to him breathe. Tell him to drive safe. Instead, the phone would ring at exactly midnight on her birthday, and Ted would be somewhere else instead of with Alice.

Two days before her birthday, Alice ran into one of Ted’s friends at the grocery store.

“You heard from Toad?” Mike asked. He had assigned nicknames to all of them; Ted was changed to Toad to abandon the aristocratic feel. Mike was married now, and his wife squeezed avocados and mangos, holding them to her bright red lips and whispering softly before dropping them into the bag.

“Not lately,” Alice replied.

He lowered his head, staring hard at the floor. His wife had moved on to squeezing oranges. Then lemons. She raised one up to the light. Inspected it thoroughly. “Won’t be long now,” he said.

Alice tore a bag from the spool and filled it with lemons. Ted hated lemons. Said they tasted like furniture polish. Said they were off-putting. She tore off another bag, and then another, and filled them until there was just enough room for the twist tie. She wondered how many more lemons she could take from the rows before they all tumbled to the ground. Which one was the linchpin? The load-bearer.

At home, Alice put the lemons in a giant bowl in the center of the kitchen table. She dreamed, that night, that the lemons became babies. The lemon babies weren’t cute. They cried constantly. One of them developed a small bit of stubble on its chin. The other, a swatch of thin hair on the top of its head and the sprout of a tiny leg, which it used to push itself out of the bowl. Another, a pair of bright blue eyes like Ted’s that followed her around the room.

She made another trip to the store, looking for ingredients to make dishes with the lemons. Lemon meringue pie, lemon cupcakes, lemon poppy seed muffins, lemon chicken, lemon hummus, egg and lemon soup. She stopped a woman who looked like she had cooked a lot of everything and asked how to make lemon bars. She bought a cheap, plastic tablecloth decorated with fluorescent yellow lemons, a lemon-scented candle, and placemats with dancing lemons wearing black sunglasses. At the checkout, the woman in line in front of her had a pair of tiny lemons dangling from her saggy lobes.

“How much for the earrings?” Alice asked her.

Once home, she unpacked the bags, narrating to an invisible audience as she described the recipes she would make. The little lemons bounced against her neck as she flung the new tablecloth open and began to cook.

“How long do you plan to keep waiting?” Maggie had asked on her last birthday.

Alice stared into the bottom of the glass. Read the warm beer like tea leaves, “He said soon.”

“He said soon,” Maggie repeated. Then, “Bartender!”

Sliced, squeezed, grated, juiced. Rinds covered the countertop like abandoned sea shells. Her feet stuck to the floor. The skin on her fingertips was puckered from lemony dishwater. She lost track of time. Her phone rang at 12:15 am. Fifteen minutes into her 39th year. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth.

“Hi, Allie. Sorry I’m a few minutes late,” his voice purred. It melted through the phone like warm lemon butter.

“Hello? Are you there?”

She hung up then reached for a knife and cut a lemon in half. She squeezed the juice into her mouth. Bit down and pulled the pulp from the rind with her teeth. If she concentrated hard enough, it tasted sweet.

Robin Littell holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. She is the author of Flight, a 2018 Vella Chapbook winner at Paper Nautilus Press. Her work has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, Fiction Southeast, Tin House Flash Fridays, Two Hawks Quarterly, Adanna, and others. You can read her stories at robinlittell.com.