I originally wanted to drag it out so he would feel the pressure.
Now I’m feeling like I’m being put through it, too.
It’s only been a little over 36 hours and I’m wishing I’d only given him a week instead of two so I can get this fucking thing with him over with.
No. I have to learn more patience.
I know I do. I’ve been better the last few years, but I’ve got a long way to go in the patience department.
My grandmother told me I was the most impatient person she had met in all her years, and she tried to drill it into me that sometimes you had to wait for things for reasons that didn’t make sense – until later when sometimes those reasons would be clear. She was a tough old woman, and she’d had a rough life, held a lot of wisdom. She told me when I was a kid that when she died she’d try her best to convince The Big Guy to let her be an angel who’d watch over me and not just so that I wouldn’t feel alone – also, so she could teach me patience. Because she was sure the patience she’d shown with my impatience would surely earn her some wings.
“Hindsight is 20/20, my boy, but you don’t have to always wait for stuff to be over to catch that. Watch for signs around you, Killy. Watch and see those signs to know you should slow down and think. Sometimes you have to wait for things. So while you wait, you plan. You plan your next move. You ready yourself through dark times for a brighter future. What you don’t do is get impatient and angry, it serves nothing.”
She’d lost her first husband a month after her honeymoon and married another man who was a womanizer and a cheater, so she raised her three kids including my mother alone. One of her sons wound up dead in a motorcycle accident just like my father and the other died of cancer. And there was my mother, a weak person. My grandmother was always frustrated with my mother’s weakness.
My grandmother hadn’t told us she was dying of Cancer; she hid it. Didn’t seek out treatment, either. Pissed me off so much. She was a stubborn woman, but I fuckin’ loved her and I was so angry trying to figure out why this fighter wouldn’t fight. And in hindsight, she spent a lot of time in her final months trying to get certain ideals to penetrate through my shield of anger about my home life. About the shithole I lived in. About how my mother wound up with loser after loser with no care for herself, our apartment, the food she fed us or the clothes she put on us.
And after Nan died, life got worse. Much worse. Fewer clothes. Less food. Holes in our shoes. Because we didn’t have anybody but our mother and she wasn’t good to anyone, she was that broken.
Luckily, I’d not only practically raised myself and my little brother by that point, but I was old enough to keep doing it. My part time job at the pizzeria bought us shoes, jeans, paid for school trips. My boss always sent food home with me, too. And then I started bookmaking and the money got better. And I was smart with it.
And through it all, through the early days without her, through the days after my mother was killed, Nan did show me signs that she was up there teaching me lessons. And I tried to emulate her strength in being there for Willie while making plans for my future while I waited to finish growing up.
As an adult, I seem to hit just about every red light wherever I go, whatever route I take. Unless I’m in my own condo where I have a key for an express elevator, the elevator always takes forever. I always find myself with long lines ahead of me. In life, it seems I am constantly faced with challenges that let me know I have to be patient to get what I want.
Is it Nan that’s making the lights go red? Maybe. Maybe not. But the seeds were planted, and I pay attention and do my best to use waiting times and drawbacks to my best advantage. It’s paid off many times. I watch, I pay attention. I plan.
Two weeks, as planned with Raymond. I have to be patient to get what I want.
But just what do I want here? That’s the question.
***
I knock on her door an hour later and hear her call out for me to come in.
She’s sitting on the desk by the window. Not the chair. She’s perched on the desk the way she’d been perched on my counter before.
“You good to go?”