With and Without

Rhona sometimes used to say to me that, meeting me as she did when I was only twenty-five, she had had the best years of my life. Truer word was never spoken. While she (to my life-long shame, remorse and regret) unquestionably had some of the worst of me, I like to think, I hope, that she also had — such as it is — all of the best of me. I was twenty-five when we met and forty-six when she died. That’s a hefty chunk of an important period of anybody’s life and Rhona had it. For all its low...