The Smallest Lights In the Universe by Sara Seager

Author:Sara Seager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-07-28T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Widows of Concord

Minnie May died not long before Valentine’s Day. She had outlived Mike after all, by more than six months. It wasn’t that close of a race in the end. I have no idea how she lived for as long as she did; she looked like a bag of bones near the finish. People gasped when they saw her. For more than a decade, she’d had medication to ward off epileptic seizures and bladder stones, and was even on Prozac for anxiety. She’d had more than her nine lives. But her heart still beat, a tiny engine custom-built to resist the finality of death.

One day Minnie May’s back legs stopped working. Some invisible internal switch had been flipped. She didn’t seem to be in pain. She didn’t seem to feel much of anything. I carried her up to my room and wrapped her in blankets. That night I woke up every hour to put my hands on her and feel her shallow breathing. I woke up one last time and reached out to find her in the dark. Minnie May had always been still something: still breathing, still living. Now she was only still.

She had been there for eighteen years, for every significant moment of my adult life, good and bad. She was my most faithful observer, and she could make me feel as though a chosen few of us might live forever. Her death felt like the hardest scientific proof that none of us do. If Minnie May could die, then everything will.

The hole that Mike had dug for her in the yard was full of snow; the pile of waiting earth was hardened into clumps. Despite his best efforts, I had to put Minnie May in the basement freezer, my makeshift kitty morgue, just as I’d stored Molly until the thaw. I came back upstairs and sat down at the kitchen table in the quiet of my once full-to-bursting home. There was a time in my life when I had my father, my husband, my dog, and my cats. I was surrounded by life and love. So much had fallen away, like parts coming off a machine. Even Jessica had decided to move out in early 2012, amicably but completely, leaving behind only my boys and me. My world was stripped down to its glowing core.

A few days later it was Valentine’s Day. Melissa, the widow from the hill, had told me on the phone that the boys were also invited. Max, Alex, and I were going to a party.

*

Equal parts nervous and hopeful—maybe more nervous than hopeful—I left work early to plan what to wear. I wore a black shirt, but I didn’t want to wear only black to the party. I wasn’t in the mood for romance, but I didn’t want it to feel like a funeral either. I wanted to dress for a celebration, even if I wasn’t sure of what, exactly. I pulled on a calf-length, fawn-colored cardigan and a bright pink scarf.

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