We were having spaghetti. Minnie was having live worms.

Jeff cautiously sat down. He looked from me to the tortoise tank and didn’t say a word. When Minnie lunged for a worm, Jeff flinched. But he didn’t get up and leave, and at the end of the evening, he asked for another date. He didn’t object weeks later when I told him I wanted us to take Minnie to Central Park, and he came with a picnic basket and a little wrapped gift. I opened it and inside was a little red rubber squid toy.

“I thought he’d like it,” Jeff said, wiggling it at Minnie, who lunged toward it.

Where my old boyfriend told me how obsessive I was about Minnie, Jeff celebrated our connection, making a fake newspaper cover featuring Minnie and me. (“Startling Tales of Tortoise Life! She holds me under the faucet!” the headline blared.)

Two years later we married and moved to Hoboken, N.J., where Minnie resided in a glass tank on a table in my writing studio. All I had to do to see him was turn around.

When Jeff and I had a child, I got critically ill with a rare blood disorder. I was in the hospital for three months and at home in bed for another six. Jeff would bring in our son every morning and set him on the bed so I could cradle and play with him. One day he brought Minnie and a towel and set him on the bed, too.

Minnie and I had been together for 20 years when his body began to fail. He refused to eat, wouldn’t walk, and even his beloved squid toy didn’t interest him. I hadn’t known how old Minnie was when I got him, so I couldn’t tell if this was the natural end of a long life or the crushing finish of a young one. The vet told me his body was shutting down and that the kindest thing I might do for him would be to put him to sleep.

I cried. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give him up.

One afternoon when Jeff wasn’t home and our son was at school, I heard a noise in my office. When I walked in, Minnie wasn’t moving, and when I lifted him, his legs fell gracelessly against my hand. Sobbing, I carried him outside to our postage stamp backyard. I wanted to bury him there so he’d always be a presence near me, but the ground was rocky and I couldn’t dig a hole deeper than four inches, barely enough to cover his shell. Worse, it started to rain, soaking me. I kept imagining Minnie’s bones floating up from the ground like something out of Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.”