And now, at sixty-one, the illness that was supposed to take him at thirty had finally, forty years late, come to collect.
“I could have called you when Carol died,” he said. “I thought about it every day for two years. But I didn’t want to come to you as a consolation prize, an old man at the end, offering you the leftovers of a life I’d already spent. You deserved better than to be someone’s deathbed regret.
But then you turned sixty. And I remembered the promise. If we’re both single at sixty. And I am single now, Ruthie. And you never married — Peter found that out for me, and when he told me, I wept, because it meant you’d waited, even without knowing you were waiting, even after I told you not to.
