Fifty-five years later, we’d come back.
At 17, none of us doubted we would.
For a while, we stayed close.
Tommy wrote from Australia. Ray sent letters from Germany. Nick eventually settled in Portugal.
Then the letters became less frequent.
Then they stopped.
I wrote too.
At first, I’d leave my letters on the hall table for my father to mail when he drove into town for the store. After a while, when nothing came back, I stopped giving him any.
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.
I opened the second box. Inside was a cheap silver compass. Ray had carried it everywhere when we were teenagers, despite being incapable of reading it properly. Beneath it was a thick bundle of paper tied with string.
Letters.
The first was dated August 1971.
“Dear Harold,”
“Germany is colder than I expected. Tommy says Australia is too hot, so between us we chose badly.”
I smiled, then I saw the final paragraph.
“You haven’t answered my last two letters. Everything okay?”
The next letter was from October.
Then December.
Then March 1972.
“Harold,”
“If you’re angry about something, tell me. Nick hasn’t heard from you either. Tommy thinks maybe your father is keeping you busy at the store.”
Another.
“We miss you, idiot.”
Another.
“Please write back, even if it’s only one sentence.”
I stared at the pages. I’d never seen any of them.
There were copies of 11 letters in that bundle.
Eleven.
I remembered checking the mailbox after work when I was 18.
Then 19.
I remembered pretending I didn’t care.
My father had noticed once. “Waiting for something?”
“No.”
“Those boys have their own lives now, Harold. You should get on with yours.”
Eventually, I had.
At the bottom of Ray’s box was a letter written by his daughter.
“My father kept almost everything from those years, including carbon copies of letters he typed before mailing them. When we found these after his death, I finally understood why he sometimes talked about you with such sadness.”
