THE TEACUP HIT THE FLOOR AND SHATTERED BETWEEN US.
I never heard it break.
I was looking at Walt.
His hand was still around my wrist.
The headlights swung across the porch again.
Gravel popped under slow tires.
“Inside,” Walt said. “Now.”
I pulled him through the door.
I threw the bolt.
My hands would not stop shaking.
Fifty-three years.
Fifty-three years, and he was standing in my front hall.
Dripping rain on my mother’s old rug.
Breathing hard like a man who had run a long way.
“Walt.” His name came out cracked. “You’re de.ad. They told me you were de.ad.”
“I know what they told you.”
“I buried you.”
“You buried a lie, sweetheart.”
The car stopped in my driveway.
The engine kept running.
Walt leaned against the wall and listened.
So did I.
A door opened out there.
Then nothing.
Just the rain and that idling motor.
“Who is that?” I whispered.
He looked at me.
Old eyes in an old face.
But they were his eyes.
“Family,” he said. “Yours.”
I want to tell you how we started.
Because you have to understand how much there was to steal.
Walt and I met the summer we turned seventeen.
Two broke kids from the wrong end of Marlow Bend.
He worked the loading dock at the grain mill.
I folded shirts at a dry cleaner on Second Street.
We had nothing.
A milkshake split two straws.
A movie meant skipping lunch all week.
But we had each other, and at seventeen that felt like plenty.
By nineteen he asked me to marry him.
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
We didn’t have money for rings.
Not real ones.
By the door of Haller’s Grill sat a dented coin machine.
Full of cheap plastic junk.
Walt fed it two nickels.
Out came two thin tin rings in little bubbles.
He laughed so hard he almost dropped them.
“These’ll do till I can buy you gold,” he said.
He never bought me gold.
He never got the chance.
I wore my mother’s church dress.
He wore his only jacket.
