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Why had he seen a head at first? Goines remembered learning the day before that an old friend of his, Paul, had died six months earlier. They had been office mates at work in their early thirties and gotten to know each other’s family for a few years after that. And though they had seen each other only once after those years – for coffee – they had kept in sporadic touch by way of email, after email had pretty much displaced handwritten communication.
Frequently over the previous couple of months, Goines had thought about Paul, because they hadn’t exchanged greetings for a long time, and he had finally, only the day before, interrogated the internet for news, quickly finding Paul’s obituary, which had been posted on one of those memorial sites. Both the obituary and a note left by Paul’s son mentioned Paul’s wit, which had meant a lot to Goines too. Goines hoped he would never forget Paul’s remark with regard to a woman they had both known: “You and I have been into some of the same things.”
Goines decided to leave his own note on the site. In it he explained how he had known Paul and how he had been thinking about him lately. He wrote that he had sent an email to Paul’s address a little over a week earlier:
Dear Paul, I have thought of you so many times lately, I realized this morning that I must have been fearful of losing you. Are you still there, are you all right? Of course, at some point, one of us is going to lose the other. I just want you to know that if I am the one to lose you, you are one of the people in my life I will most hate to have lost.Goines was well beyond the yard with the football now, sweating profusely in the morning heat. As soon as he got back home, he removed his T-shirt and hung it up to dry.
He decided to remain shirtless while he did a couple of chores in the back yard. The breeze back there felt good on his damp skin, and he felt alive, and glad to be alive.
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Life.
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