Yoko was thinking about her husband while staring up at the night sky.
It was a clear evening. She was wiping the lens of the telescope she’d lent to her son and never gotten back, when a piece of trivia surfaced in her mind — something she’d heard on TV. Blue-white stars burn the hottest and most ferociously, but they don’t last long. The dim, reddish ones burn slow and steady, outliving everything else. The longest-surviving stars in the universe, it turns out, are the boring red ones.
That sent her back twenty-seven years, to a winter she hadn’t thought about in a while.
There had been a man named Sakamoto. Tall, with eyes that crinkled when he smiled. People turned to look at him when he walked into a room. Every party got a little brighter the moment he showed up. They’d dated for about six months — they were the same year in university — and the reason it ended was simply that Sakamoto didn’t last. It wasn’t just the women, either. Jobs, friendships, ambitions: everything burned bright and sputtered out fast. Last she heard, he was on his third divorce.
Her husband Keichi, by contrast, had been unremarkable from the day she met him.
Quiet voice. Awkward little laugh. He’d ordered coffee jelly on their first date. At parties he planted himself in a corner seat, well outside whatever circle was making noise. And yet here they were, twenty-three years later, still running. No job changes. Same hobbies he’s always had. Up at the same time every morning. Does the after-dinner dishes on a rotating schedule, without complaint, without drama.
Huh, Yoko thought.
Keichi is a red star. Plain, unhot, unblinding. But exactly the kind of star that outlasts everything else in the cosmos. Sakamoto must have been a blue one — all that brilliance just proof of a short life ahead. The universe had known all along. The flashy ones burn out first. That’s just how it works.
She carried this quiet revelation back into the kitchen.
Keichi was crouched in front of the open refrigerator. He was wrapping the leftover shumai from dinner — three pieces, each one neatly sealed in plastic wrap.