Eugene was in the queue beside me.
We are always bumping into one another at the shops, possibly because we both freelance and can do our errands when others are non-freelancing for their paychecks.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Haven’t seen you around for a while.’
‘I’ve moved out of town,’ he said. ‘I went to look after my mother when she was sick in December.’
‘And how is she now?’
As I asked it, I knew what the answer was going to be.
She’d died, he told me.
We walked out of the shop together as he relayed this chapter of his life.
It was late afternoon and I had nothing urgent to do for the rest of the day. I felt no pressure to hurry along. We stood outside Clicks – me leaning against the shopping centre’s gallery balustrade, him clutching the box of oats he’d just bought – and spoke for longer than we ever have in the thirty years we’ve known one another as nothing more than colleagues from our days at the newspaper.
