PART 2
I sat down on that bench — our bench, the same wood, grayer now, the way we all were — and I opened the first box with shaking hands.
It was from Tommy. The one who went to Australia.
Inside was a cricket ball, worn soft, and a photograph of a life I’d never seen — Tommy old, surrounded by children and grandchildren, on a beach under a hard bright sun. And a letter, in handwriting I somehow still recognized after fifty-five years.
“Harold. If you’re reading this, then you drove out to the lake, you stubborn old goat, and I knew you would. You were always the one who kept things.
I’m sorry I’m not there in person. I wanted to be. I planned to be, for years — I had it circled on every calendar I ever owned. But my heart’s not what it was, and the doctors won’t let me make the flight, and by the time you read this I may not be here at all to have tried.
So I sent myself instead. The best pieces of me. That cricket ball is from the first match I ever coached, forty years of Saturday mornings with other people’s kids, and every one of them I taught the way you four taught me what a friend is.
I never made another set of friends like you three. Not in fifty-five years, not on the other side of the world. You don’t, after seventeen. Nobody tells you that at seventeen. The friends you make at the lake are the last friends who’ll ever know the boy before the man.
I remembered, Harold. Every year. I remembered the bench. I remembered the promise. I remembered all of you, every day of a good long life I got to live because I once had three friends who made me brave enough to leave home and find it.
Thank you for going to the lake.
I knew one of us would.
I always knew it would be you.”
I cried on that bench like I hadn’t cried in years. And then, because there were two more boxes, and because Tommy would have called me a coward for stopping, I opened the next one.
