The Last Green Thing

Margot hadn't spoken to Sarah in three years when she got the call. Sarah's sister, voice cracking: 'She wanted you to have him.'

The 'him' was Barnaby, a wheezing golden retriever with cataracts and an appetite for destruction. Margot, who hadn't so much as kept a houseplant alive since her divorce, now found herself responsible for a creature whose very existence seemed to depend on her competence.

The first week was a disaster. Barnaby ate her takeout containers, shredded her mail, and stared at her with those milky eyes like he knew she was failing. At 2 AM, sitting on her kitchen floor surrounded by the debris of another attempted meal, Margot googled 'what dogs can eat' and found herself staring at a list that included spinach.

Spinach. Sarah's word for anything that was good for you but miserable to endure. Spinach moments, she'd called them during their decade-long friendship—breakups, layoffs, that time Margot's father died and Sarah showed up with wilted grocery store flowers and sat on her couch while Margot cried.

'You're my spinach friend,' Sarah had told her once, drunk on cheap wine. 'You make me healthier but god, you're bitter sometimes.'

Margot had stopped calling. Stopped coming over. Now here was Barnaby, Sarah's final fuck-you.

She started cooking for him. Real food, with vegetables. Her kitchen began to smell of garlic and olive oil again, something it hadn't smelled since before the marriage ended. Barnaby stopped wheezing so much. Started sleeping at the foot of her bed instead of in the bathroom.

'This is a spinach moment,' she told him one night, watching him lick his bowl clean. 'Your person is gone and I'm terrible at this and we're both miserable.'

He thumped his tail against the floorboards.

Margot started calling Sarah's sister. Asked about the funeral. About Sarah's last days. Learned that Sarah had kept a photo of them on her nightstand through all those years of silence.

'Barnaby was her favorite thing,' the sister said. 'She made me promise he'd go to you if anything happened. Said you needed someone to take care of.'

Margot looked at the dog, who was now snoring gently on her rug. She realized she'd been eating her own spinach for three years—pushing away the people who made her feel things, choosing safety over the messiness of love.

She picked up her phone. Her thumbs hovered over Sarah's number in her contacts, still there after all this time. But Sarah was gone.

So she called her sister instead.

'I'd like to hear about her last spinach moment,' Margot said. 'And maybe tell you about mine.'

Barnaby lifted his head at the sound of her voice, thumping his tail. Outside, the first spring buds were pushing through the dirt in the window box he'd somehow managed not to destroy.