When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.
Gil and I became best friends at seventeen.
Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Just Gil and Lorna.
He went out with other girls. I went to the leavers’ dance with somebody else. Everybody in Rowe’s Mill said we would work it out eventually, and the two of us used to laugh about it, because losing the friendship seemed far more frightening than risking it on a feeling neither of us could have named at that age.
One night in the July we were nineteen, after two spectacularly bad dates, we ended up sitting under the bleachers at the football field with a bag of chips between us.
And Gil held out his little finger and said: “If we’re both
