Eventually, silence begins to feel like an answer.
I married, had two children, buried my parents, lost my wife six years ago, became a grandfather, and grew old in the same town where we’d all started.
But I never forgot the lake. I went back many times over the years.
Sometimes I’d sit on our bench and trace those four initials, remembering the boys we’d been and wondering where life had taken them.
And every time, I’d think about our promise and hope that somehow, when the 55 years were finally up, they’d remember it too.
Apparently, they had.
The boxes were different sizes.
My hands were shaking when I opened the first.
I lifted out the red fishing lure, and laughed before I could stop myself.
Tommy had bought it when we were 16.
He’d spent three weeks bragging that it would catch the biggest bass in the lake.
It never caught anything.
Underneath it was an envelope.
The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the first sentence wasn’t.
“Harold,”
“If you’re sitting on our bench, you remembered.”
I sat down.
The letter was from Tommy.
He had written it only seven months earlier.
He wrote about Australia, his wife, his children and grandchildren. He wrote that he’d spent years imagining the four of us as old men sitting beside the lake. Then came the sentence that stopped me.
“I wish we’d had the courage to ask you why you stopped writing.”
“But if you came back to that bench, maybe I was wrong about you.”
I read it twice.
Stopped writing?
Tommy said the three of them had remained in contact.
Not constantly, but enough.
Christmas cards. Phone calls. Eventually emails.
And apparently my name had never disappeared from their conversations.
For years, they’d wondered what they’d done to make me cut them out of my life.
My stomach tightened.
