When Are You Leaving?
My writer soulmate, Will North, was generous enough to guest blog for me this week. You can find his beautiful love stories, along with the first mystery in his new series, on Amazon. He’s an exceptional writer with a huge heart, which shows in his work.
Enjoy.
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When Are You Leaving?
I first got in trouble with women in kindergarten, by sneaking a kiss from a cute blond behind the tropical fish tank. We’ve been dearest friends ever since (it must have been some kiss!). We went through grammar school and junior and senior high school together and as the years passed the friendship—which was all it ever was—just kept deepening. It deepens still, more than a half century later. We’re in touch, lately via email or Facebook, often weekly. Her husband is very tolerant about this. So is my wife. Somehow they understand that at some level we have been joined at the hip all this time. She is full of mischief and delight. We confide in each other and we critique each other. Both actions are founded on honesty, trust, and affection—albeit in the fun-poking way that comes naturally when you’re from the East Coast.
I put much of her mischievousness down to her mother, an almost elfin, tough-minded, soft-hearted Irishwoman whom I adored. We were close neighbors and she was a like a second mother to me, affectionate and stern in roughly equal measure. And every time I knocked on their apartment door as a kid, she’d open it and say:
“When are you leaving?”
She wasn’t trying to be rude (New Yorkers don’t have to try, it comes naturally). No, actually, she was looking out for me: she wanted to know when my own mother expected me home, so my mother wouldn’t worry. Then she’d sweep me inside to a place that felt like home.
But somehow that question, “When are you leaving?” stuck. For years. For decades. And it always made us laugh. I don’t know whether she ever harbored the notion that her daughter and I would one day marry. In truth we had only ever had one “date,” when I took the girl to a play in the city on her birthday. But that was not unusual in our crowd. Most of us had known each other from grammar school. We were all always together, right through high school, the whole group of us. But at rock bottom, I think my friend’s mother simply trusted me to be a gentleman and to look out for her daughter…and woe betide me if I ever stepped out of line.
By the eleventh grade, I had grown to almost six and a half feet tall. I’d stand in the mother’s doorway, looming high above her. She’d crane her neck upward and say, always, “When are you leaving?”
Whenever I came back from college to visit her and her wonderful husband (the daughter was off at another college), it was “When are you leaving?” When I brought my infant son by for inspection, it was “When are you leaving?”
And when her own life neared its end, I paid a visit. She looked up from her bed and asked, for the thousandth time, “When are you leaving?” I bent over, kissed her hollowing cheek, and whispered in her ear:
“Never.”
