I married my high school sweetheart at seventy.
Two weeks later, his children threw me out of his house with nothing but the dress I was wearing.
His daughter stood in the doorway while his son carried my suitcase down the front steps.
“Get out,” she said.
I looked at her, stunned.
“Please,” I whispered. “At least let me take his photograph.”
She folded her arms.
“No.”
That single word broke something inside me.
His son dropped my suitcase beside my feet.
“Nothing in this house belongs to you.”
I looked back through the doorway.
Our wedding photograph was still sitting on the mantel.
Thomas and me.
Two old people smiling like teenagers.
I had married him only three months earlier.
And now I was standing outside the home we had shared, wondering how a lifetime could disappear so quickly.
I was seventy years old.
Thomas was seventy-one.
And before we were old, before we had wrinkles and grown children and grandchildren, before either of us had learned what grief really meant, we had been seventeen.
It had started behind the bleachers.
Thomas had kissed me there for the first time.
It was raining that afternoon, and I remember being angry because my hair was getting wet.
