The Last Planetarium Showing

So there I was, sixty-three years old, twelve years a security guard and four years happily single, and I get an email from Alec on a Tuesday morning. Alec! My ex! The man I walked out on when I was fifty-nine because he wanted more of me than I had to give!

Let me back up. Alec is sixty-two now, trains bartenders at the Anchor pub two streets from his cottage, and we were together two years, back when I was doing event security at festivals. Met him at a gate check, he was pouring pints at the staff tent, and it went on two years until I got sick of him wanting more. More weekends. More mornings. More me. I like my own company, always have, and I told him so and left.

Four years of silence and then Tuesday morning, coffee in hand, I open my email and there he is.

Cate,

Need a favor. Dog-sitting this weekend if you're willing. Saturday and Sunday, maybe into Monday. Juniper is fourteen now and slow and she'll be no trouble. Key under the mat as always.

Also I found your mortar and pestle in the back of my cupboard. Thought you'd want it back.

It would be good to talk. There's a special showing at your planetarium coming up. I saw the poster in town.

Alec

I read it twice! I nearly spat my coffee! The cheek of the man, "it would be good to talk," after four years of nothing! And "thought you'd want it back," as if I'd been pining over a kitchen tool! Juniper is his collie, she can't even work a can opener, and she's the only one in that house I ever missed!

But the dog. Oh, the dog. Juniper is fourteen and she used to lie across my feet on his couch like she was guarding me, and I have missed that animal more than I ever admitted to myself. So I sat there with my coffee going cold and I typed the shortest email of my life.

Alec,

Yes, I'll take the dog. Saturday morning, key under the mat works.

The mortar and pestle is mine. It was a gift from my sister before she moved to Canada. Send it with the dog or I'll come collect it.

No small talk needed. I don't want to talk. Enjoy your weekend away.

Cate

I hit send before I could soften it. Then I felt bad about "enjoy your weekend away," which sounded as if a door slammed, but then I remembered he was the one emailing his ex for dog-sitting, so he could live with a slammed door.

* * *

He did reply, the fool. Not an email, a text, which I suppose tells you how rattled he was. A photograph of Juniper sprawled on his old brown couch, grey muzzle, one ear up, staring straight into the camera like she knew what was happening. The caption underneath said "She misses you too."

I did not reply. I wanted to! I looked at that dog for a good five minutes, I'll admit that. Fourteen years old and still doing the ear thing. But replying to that text would be talking, and I had said no small talk, so I put the phone face down on the counter and went to work.

Work, for those of you who don't know, is the planetarium. Night security, mostly. Big white dome on the edge of town that glows like an egg when the evening shows run. Most nights the last show empties out by ten and then it's me and the empty building until six.

And I know how that sounds, a woman of sixty-three alone in a dark dome all night, but honestly? I love it. That's the thing nobody ever got about me, not Alec, not anyone. I like the quiet. After the last family leaves I do my rounds, check the doors, and then sometimes I just sit in the projection room with the lights off and the star projector idling, and I run the night sky for myself. No narrator. No kids asking questions. Just the stars going round, silent as anything, and me with my thermos.

I'd rather have that than most people's company, I truly would. So when I got home from my Thursday shift at half six in the morning, hollow-eyed and buzzing, I sat at my kitchen table and I don't know what possessed me but I typed him a long one.

Alec,

It's Thursday morning and I've just come off nights so forgive me if this is a ramble. You caught me at my worst hour.

The planetarium is doing this special showing you mentioned. I don't know what the poster says but it's a retro thing, the old star projector running the way it did in the seventies, no digital tricks. Management asked me to work it since I know the building best. Last Saturday of the month, evening show, probably a full house because the town loves an anniversary.

My job has a quality that you never understood, and I don't expect you to start now. When the dome empties out and I'm doing rounds, there's this moment where the ceiling still holds the last of the light, all those pinpricks fading, and it's the quietest place I've ever known. Quieter than your cottage. Quieter than the sea wall. I have stood in the middle of that floor at four in the morning and thought, this is it, this is the whole of what I need, and I have never once felt lonely doing it.

You used to say a person couldn't live like that. You used to say I was building a wall with a chair propped against it. Well, four years on, the chair is still holding.

Anyway. Juniper. If she's on the same medication, it's two pills with the morning feed and one with the evening, and she won't eat the evening one unless it's in cheese. She likes the radio low. She hates the wind off the water so keep the back gate shut.

I'd rather be under that dome at four in the morning than standing at your door, and I say that without any meanness in it. It's just the truth of me. It was always the truth of you too, in a way, that you couldn't accept it. That's not a wound, it's just arithmetic.

Send the mortar and pestle. It's granite, it's heavy, it was my sister's before she went to Canada, and I miss having it on the counter.

Cate

I read that back before sending and I thought, well, that's four paragraphs more than the man deserves. But I was tired and the stars were still in my eyes, in a manner of speaking, and tired Cate is honest Cate.

He replied the next morning, which told me he'd been sitting on his phone waiting, and all it said was:

Received. Dog ready Saturday, ten sharp. Mortar and pestle in the carrier bag with her lead. Cheese noted.

No sign-off. No "hope you're well." No "sorry about four years ago." Fine. Two can play at that game, and I have been playing it longer.

Then Friday night, mid-shift, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Another text. A photograph, again. This time it was the carrier bag sitting on his doorstep, and the mortar and pestle's granite head poking out the top, and Juniper's lead coiled on top of it, and I could see the sea wall in the background and his green door with the paint peeling at the bottom the way it always did.

No caption at all this time. Just the picture.

I stood in the dark corridor of the planetarium, under the humming dome, with that picture glowing on my screen, and I swore at him under my breath. Because why photograph the bag? Why not just leave the bag? A man doesn't photograph a bag unless he wants the woman to look at his doorstep and think about it.

I put the phone away. I did my rounds. I checked the fire exits and the projection room and the little