Daniel smiled.
Mrs. Parker looked toward me.
Then toward Owen.
“You’ve been spending too much time around books.”
“Stories have endings.”
“Books do.”
She stood and brushed soil from her hands.
“People don’t. Not really.”
Owen looked skeptical.
“Everyone has an ending.”
“An individual life does.”
Mrs. Parker pointed toward Thomas’s tuning fork in his hand.
“But look at what you’re holding.”
Owen glanced down.
A tool once held by a young music teacher.
Passed to his son.
Then to a boy born decades later.
Mrs. Parker touched the tuning fork.
“Thomas is gone.”
The metal still hummed faintly.
“But something he made reached you.”
Owen looked toward the school visible beyond the houses.
The song had reached him.
The letters had reached Mrs. Parker.
Mrs. Parker’s kindness had reached students who had carried it into adulthood.
Those students had become parents, teachers, neighbors, friends.
Things continued.
Not perfectly.
Not forever.
