At nineteen we promised that if we were both single at sixty we would find each other. I turned sixty on Tuesday, and the old landline rang.
PART 1 — THE CHAIR
Gil and I were best friends from seventeen.
Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Just Gil and Roz.
He went out with other girls. I went to prom with Dermot Nash, who was perfectly nice. Everybody in Belmire told us we would work it out eventually and we laughed at them, because losing it was more frightening than whatever the other thing was.
One night in the summer we were nineteen, after two spectacularly bad dates, we sat under the bleachers at the school field with a bag of chips.
“If we’re both single at sixty,” he said, and put his little finger out, “we stop being idiots and we find each other.”
“Deal.”
Two months after that he went to college three states away.
We wrote constantly and then a lot and then less.
And by the time I had worked out what I actually was about that man, Gil Hartigan was telling me about a girl in his year.
In the August of 1986 one more letter came.
He was getting married. And at the bottom he asked me not to write to him again.
I cried for about three weeks and then I did what he asked, because that is what you do.
I never married. When people ask I say I never met the right one.
That is not strictly true. I met him at seventeen and I never got round to anybody else.
Last Tuesday I turned sixty.
That night the landline went. The old one, in my mother’s house, that nobody rings any more, and I nearly left it.
“Is that Roslyn?”
“Yes.”
“My name’s Casper. I’m Gil Hartigan’s son.” A pause. “My dad would like to speak to you. He hasn’t got very long.”
There was a rustling.
And then a voice I had not heard since 1986.
“Rozzie.”
I had to sit down on the stairs.
“You remembered.”
A small laugh with nothing behind it. “I remembered every birthday.”
Then it went.
“Roz. I need you to know something before I go.”
“What?”
“I’d already bought the ring.”
I could not make a sound.
“What ring?”
“The one I was going to give you before I went. That summer.”
And I said, “Then why did you marry somebody else?” — which is a question I had not let myself ask out loud in thirty-nine years.
And that man started crying down a telephone.
“That’s what I’ve spent forty years wanting to explain.”
Then, very quietly: “Come to St. Ide’s. There’s something here you need to see. Once you’ve seen it you’ll understand why I stopped.”
Forty minutes later I pushed that door open.
He was in the bed. Thinner than the boy, and completely, unmistakably him.
But it was not Gil that made the noise come out of me.
It was what was propped on the chair beside his bed.
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