Good night Take Care I Love You

Good-night. Take Care. I Love You

Alma was standing at the end of a check-out line-up when her phone buzzed. Again. Third time in an hour. This time she didn’t bother digging into her purse to find the phone and assure herself it was just him and not something urgent.

Her sister Paula nudged up against her buttocks with her shopping cart and took a place behind her in the line-up. “Ha! You beat me this time,” she said. Paula was usually first to get around the grocery store circuit. Unlike Alma, she was vigorous, driven to get things done. All of her actions and activities had shapes and forms and hard edges - they were defined and finite. They could be checked off a list and dismissed. She exhausted Alma.

“He texted again,” Alma told her sister.

“Jeeesus.” Paula muttered. This, you see, was just the sort of thing that perplexed Paula: a presence from the past that had outlived its utility but stuck around. “What does he want now?”

“I think he’s a bit worried about that last MRI,” Alma responded. “He probably just wants to talk it through.”

“Why doesn’t he call someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about, like his doctor? Why doesn’t he drop in on his brother, you know? Have a coffee and a chat, if he needs to onload on someone. I don’t understand why he sends you these texts. It’s not like you can drop everything and get into it with him, Alma. You certainly can’t interpret an MRI for him!”

“True. I can’t. He calls me eventually.” Alma shrugged. “We talk things through. Seems to de-stress him somehow.”

Paula eyed Alma skeptically. “That’s strange, you know. I mean, he’s odd, for sure, but you’re just as weird for going along with it. When’s the last time you saw the man?”

“During COVID. That would make it almost five years ago.”

“How were you able to see him? You lived in different provinces!” Paula was incredulous – no one she knew in Welland had done unnecessary inter-provincial travel in the middle of the pandemic.

“There were hoops to jump through, but it was doable.” Alma replied. “The Maritime Provinces were in their own bubble, so I just filled out a form online and showed a permission slip at the border checkpoint. It really was lovely to travel. Made COVID less crushing, somehow.”

“Do you ever wish you hadn’t made the effort? Maybe he wouldn’t still be texting you if you’d just let the relationship go. Some of my friendships went away, and I can’t say I really miss them.” Paula giggled at that, like a mischievous middle-schooler, but Alma wasn’t buying it. Paula worked hard at her current friendships - that much Alma had learned in the year and a half they had been living in the same city – for all her apparent crustiness, she had a soft and loyal heart. Her lost friendships still stung. COVID had hurt.

“By the way, Paula. I’m not weird. You’re weird for thinking I’m weird.” Alma smiled and, it being her turn, she began to load her groceries unto the belt. She vowed to text him as soon as she got home and had the groceries put away and a mug of coffee in hand.

At home, Alma put just about everything away, but there were the packages of meat to deal with: they were meant to be divided into meal-sized portions. She climbed a small step ladder to pull the vacuum-sealer down from the top of the fridge, made packages then labeled each package. She carried them down to the basement and placed them in her chest freezer. Then she had to sit on the bottom step for a few minutes before climbing back up. The stairs seemed steeper every time she used them.

Back in the kitchen, she made a mug of instant coffee. She wanted badly to sit down because her sciatica hurt – she didn’t want to wait for an entire pot to drip. She regretted that she had been too stubborn to buy one of the coffee makers that required nothing more than water, a coffee pod and the punch of a couple of buttons to deliver a quick cuppa. She quietly considered them an abomination and incontrovertible proof that Western society was mindless and useless. She never said that to anyone, of course. She hated controversy.

She sat in her recliner with her mug of coffee no more than ten inches away on the side table and her phone resting beside it. She picked up the phone and swiped to her message ap, prepared, finally, to read all his messages and respond. He now had her undivided attention, which, she had learned over the years, was the only way to communicate with him. Misunderstandings and hurt feelings were the outcomes when anything less was tendered. He had taught her to pay attention to the little things, the nuances, the details. It was, in its way, a very demanding friendship. The more-so, it seemed, because it had been a long time since there had been any ‘face-to-face’ to smooth the edges of bold and blatant text.

Was it worth it? Paula would likely have said it wasn’t. But Paula hadn’t lived the life Alma had, hadn’t had need of a man like him.

Before Alma could open her messaging ap, she noted in her peripheral vision that she needed to plug in her phone. She never texted while her phone charged: there was no place she could perch comfortably near an outlet. She really meant to have bought a longer cord by now. There was no point sending her text yet. It would unleash a potential hurricane of messages on his end that she would not get to until her phone was fully charged. Just a little longer, and she would be able to tender that full and undivided attention he liked so well. She plugged her phone into a kitchen receptacle and laid it on the counter to charge.

She eased herself carefully into her recliner once again, this time with the TV remote in her hand and clicked through her streaming services, looking for something undemanding with which to pass the time. She decided on a documentary about predatory cats. Her own cat, of glossy coat and mincing paws, sat motionless in front of the TV. His intense grey eyes followed every move of the sleek hunters who made getting dinner such an exciting game to watch.

Alma’s mind drifted. She couldn’t help it. She had seen this documentary several times before. Her cat, however, never tired of it, and that is why she had played it yet again. It’s the feline version of a Superman movie, she thought, and left him to it while she pondered what she would talk to her friend about – what would interest him and take him out of himself for a little while?

She knew that she could sometimes, even now, make him laugh. They had always been able to do that for each other. One reason she had loved him then and loved him still was that he had found and enjoyed the goofy and vulnerable girl she concealed within. She trusted very few people with her unfettered self. He was one of the few, and given her age, there were fewer all the time. Most, in fact, were gone.

She let her mind drift back to their college days, when they had been room-mates, adults jettisoned by life and troubled marriages, finding themselves overcoming grief in increments though never completely while washing dishes and scrambling eggs; forging a gentle friendship and an intellectual companionship that made life more than bearable. It wasn’t a platonic relationship (though in later years it became that): their physical relationship was boisterous and playful and it healed her like years of therapy would never have done.

She considered what she had learned from him: to love but not to grasp tightly. At first, she had been shocked to discover that he continued to love his wife. Over the many years of their friendship, she had grown to respect his constancy. She knew it applied to her as well. And when she had wandered far afield into another relationship that twisted and turned and ultimately went nowhere at all, he was there to offer her sensible if sarcastic advice and remind her that her path was her own and inviolate.

She dozed for a while in her recliner, only half aware that the documentary had ended and her cat had come to curl up in her lap. She fought wakefulness – the warmth of the cat’s body and the soothing vibration of it’s purr were deliciously comfortable. On another level, though, she was aware that her phone must be well and truly charged by now, and she must text her friend. She sat up straight, grasped her mug and took several large mouthfuls of coffee, cold now but in her opinion only marginally less tasty. She moved forward in the recliner and that was enough to dislodge the cat from her lap. He jumped to the floor with an irritated little harrumphing noise and swatted at her ankles.

“Brat!” she said. She went to the kitchen, unplugged her phone from the charger, and brought it back to the side table. Feeling the evening chill, she wrapped herself in a lightweight afghan and cuddled into the recliner, picked up the phone to read the three text messages her friend had left for her. She discovered that there was a fourth and it was the one that was displayed onscreen, so she read it first.

‘Alma, this is Marcel’s brother, Robert. You may remember me. Marcel passed away about an hour ago. He tried to reach you but he couldn’t so he said to tell you: Good-night. Take care. I love you. I’m so sorry, Alma.’

Alma smiled through her tears. Then, faithful to their sign-off tradition, no matter where in the world they were, she whispered for the last time, ‘Good-night. Take care. I love you, too.’