PART 1 — THE DOORSTEP
Cal and I were together from sixteen. We were one of those couples the whole school had decided about.
At nineteen he asked me and of course I said yes, and we had no money at all, not for anything.
We were in a diner on Fenn Street and by the door there was one of those machines full of plastic capsules with rubbish in them.
He put two quarters in and got two metal rings out.
I wore a white sundress. He wore the suit he had bought for graduation. We did it at the courthouse on a Tuesday with two strangers as witnesses and I have never been happier in my life, before or since, and I am seventy-four.
A week later he was called up.
I told him I would wait however long it took.
We wrote constantly for about six months and then the letters stopped.
Then a man from his unit wrote to me — Ward Pellow — and said Cal had gone missing after an attack.
After the war Ward came to this town and sat in my mother’s front room and told me there was no possible way anybody could have come out of what happened.
I kept wearing the ring.
My parents were not unkind about it and they were relentless. I was twenty-two, I was twenty-five, I was thirty. There were men. There was one in 1981 who was extremely good to me for two years.
I could not do it. I have never been able to explain that to anybody without sounding like a fool, and I have stopped trying.
Fifty-five years.
The ring is in a box on the shelf. It went green in about 1977 and I stopped wearing it and I have never once thrown it out.
This house is quiet. Not always — my sister’s grandchildren come, and there is a great-grandchild now.
And one evening in the spring I was making tea and somebody knocked.
I opened that door and everything stopped.
Grey. Lined. Thinner. And completely, absolutely him.
I could not make one sound.
And he held up his hand, and between two fingers was a metal ring that came out of a machine in a diner on Fenn Street in 1970.
“Hello, sweetheart.”
I got hold of the door frame.
“I never forgot you.”
And then he said:
“Somebody didn’t want me coming home. And you won’t believe who it was.”
“Cal—”
“Let me in and I’ll tell you.”
PART 2 — THE WAKE
My father died in the February of 1974.
There were about twenty-five people back at the house afterward.
I had the ring on a chain round my neck by then because my hands had swollen that winter and I could not get it on.
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