Garrett Hayes kissed me for the first time behind the high school grades in 1972.
I was seventeen. He had eighteen. Garrett had a crooked smile, a rust-colored Chevrolet pickup truck and the habit of making promises as if the universe had already committed to fulfill them.
That afternoon, he took my face in his hands and said, “Eleanor, someday I’ll buy you a diamond ring.”
I laughed. The soles of his shoes were peeling off and his truck only started when he was hitting the board.
“With what money?”
“I will solve it.”
That was Garrett.
One rainy afternoon, he accompanied me walking home two miles after his truck broke down. When we got to my porch, his shoes were completely soaked, but he didn’t complain.
I thought that was what eternity looked like.
Then my father helped a job in another state. Garrett went to work for his uncle in Ohio. The calls were expensive, the cards became less frequent and pride filled the void that honesty should have left.
Neither of them betrayed the other. Life just attracted us and we finally separated.
I marry Thomas Reed, a patient and hardworking man. We raised two daughters in a small Indiana town, and I loved him for the constant, generous man he was.
Garrett married Margaret, raised Alice and Brent, founded a successful construction company, and bought a huge brick house on the outskirts of Columbus.
For more than five decades, our lives went parallel without touching each other.
Thomas died after forty-six years of marriage. A few years later, Margaret also passed away.
We both loved good people. We both buried them.
Then, fifty-three years after our last farewell, Garrett found me in a church cake sale.
The man on the cake table
I was preparing lemon bars when someone behind me said, “You keep wearing your hair the same.”
I was paralyzed.
I turned around and found Garrett next to a table full of apple pies. Her hair was silver, her shoulders slightly slouched, but her crooked smile was still intact.
“And you keep talking too softly,” I said.
It rivers so hard that three church ladies turned to look at him.
Garrett bought two cakes he didn’t need and stayed until the sale was over. Afterwards, we had coffee in a coffee shop and chatted until the waitress started stacking chairs around us.
He told me about Margaret. I’ll tell you about Thomas.
We didn’t compare them or pretend that our marriages had been mistakes. We speak with gratitude. Garrett had not returned to erase my past, but to join the part of my life that still remained.
Over the next three months, we visited farmers’ markets, watched old movies and complained about restaurant coffee. For the first time since Thomas’ death, I laughed without feeling guilty afterwards.
One afternoon, Garrett took me to the old football field of our high school. Graduates had been replaced and a locked fence prevented us from accessing the place where he first kissed me.
“Goodbye to romanticism,” I said.
He pulled a velvet box out of his coat.
Inside was a simple diamond ring.
“I told you I would solve it.”
She was seventy-two years old and cried like a little girl in the flashing light of a parking lot.
“Yes,” I whispered. Of course I’ll marry you.
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