Small Deaths

The first thing Margaret noticed when she returned to her apartment after the funeral was the goldfish. Leonard had won it at a carnival twelve years ago, during that brief period of their marriage when they still made the effort to pretend they were happy. The fish swam in lazy circles, entirely unaware that the man who fed it each morning was never coming back.

Margaret stood in the doorway of her apartment, carrying the box of Leonard's belongings that the nursing home had given her. His hair—still thick and startlingly white despite the dementia—brushed against her wrist where she'd tucked the lock of it she'd cut before they closed the casket.

She set the box down and approached the bowl. The goldfish was named Lucky, a joke Leonard had made every time one of their neighbors' pets died. They'd all outlived the dogs and cats of their building. But Lucky was bloated now, floating near the surface, and Margaret realized with a start that the creature had been dead for days.

She didn't cry. She'd done enough of that in the hospice room, holding Leonard's hand while he forgot her name over and over, calling her "mother" and then "sweetheart" and finally just "you."

Instead, she carried the bowl to the bathroom and poured Lucky into the toilet. She watched the fish swirl away, then pressed the handle. A small death to mark the big one.

Her cat, Barnaby, wound around her ankles, meowing for dinner. He was ancient now—seventeen, the same age as their marriage had been when Leonard got sick. Margaret picked him up, burying her face in his orange fur. He smelled of cat litter and sunbeams, of continuity.

"Just us now," she whispered, and something in her chest loosened. Not the grief—that would take longer—but the terrible tightness of expectation. She was fifty-three years old. She had enough money to last a decade if she was careful. She had time.

She carried Barnaby to the window and looked out at the city below. The hair she'd tucked in her pocket pressed against her hip, a phantom weight. Somewhere out there, a woman was having dinner with her first husband. Somewhere, a carnival was handing out goldfish in plastic bags to couples who would spend the next decade figuring out how to leave each other.

Margaret set Barnaby down and opened her refrigerator. She took out the bottle of white wine she'd been saving for a special occasion. It had been there since their anniversary, three months ago.

The first glass was for Leonard. The second was for the woman she was becoming.