She does not always ask.
She has too much pride to ask in the direct way, too much of the self-sufficiency she built over a lifetime of not having the luxury of needing people to stay, of having had to let people go because that is what was required and what was required was what she did, without complaint, without the kind of lingering that might have been read as neediness, which she would not have allowed herself to be read as, not then, not when the needing was something to be managed quietly rather than named.
But that night she looked at me when I picked up my coat and she said: do you have to go yet.
Not do you have to go. Yet. The yet is the whole of it. The yet is the question inside the question, the one that says: I am not asking you to stay forever, I am not asking you to rearrange your life, I am just asking whether the going has to happen right now, in this exact moment, before the evening has finished being the evening. Do you have to go yet.
I put my coat back down.
I said: not yet. And I meant it without reservation, without the calculation of what the staying would cost me in the practical sense, without the accounting of the drive home and the hour and the things that still needed doing. I put the coat down and I meant it and we watched another hour of the program and she fell asleep in the chair and I sat with her while she slept because the sitting felt like the right thing, because being there while she slept felt like an extension of the being there while she was awake, like the care does not stop when the person stops being conscious of the care.
I drove home at ten thirty.
The things that had needed doing were still there and they waited and nothing was harmed by the waiting. The hour I gave her was not taken from anywhere that could not afford to give it. The coat on the chair for one more hour cost me nothing I needed and gave her something she needed and I would do it again every time, every single time she looks at me when I pick up my coat and says: do you have to go yet.
Not yet. Not yet. The answer is always not yet for as long as I have not yet to give.
