Robyn lost her husband the same day I lost my best friend. We sat across from each other at Mike’s hospital bed, moments after he passed. She caressed his forehead while I looked away, trying to ground myself as the room spun. I couldn’t bear to see my larger-than-life friend drained of color for fear I would remember him this way.
My friendship with Mike dates back to 1989, when we were teenagers growing up outside Detroit. Our lives revolved around the restaurant where we hustled for tips to pay our way through the local college. Left behind by our peers who were off to their dream schools, we forged unlikely friendships with the collective of just-passing-throughs and lifers who made up the restaurant staff.
Mike and I were each other’s wingmen, him setting me up with the hot cook du jour, who inevitably broke my heart, and me setting him up with the hot waitress du jour, whose heart he inevitably broke.
When Mike met Robyn, the playboy in him gave way to a hopeless romantic. Mike and Robyn were friends in high school, but a misunderstanding led to a falling out, leaving them estranged. A couple of years after graduation, they ran into each other at a funeral and found they had forgotten why they hated each other so much. He was smitten.
