Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 49826 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 249(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49826 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 249(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
There were no cell phones back then, and I hadn’t had the sense to exchange numbers. Since we lived so close in the same town, we just knew we’d find each other. I had his address, but too late, I realized it was of no use. Hal had gone back to university up North, and I had no way of getting in touch with him.
Mom hadn’t let me return home for five years, not until after I’d gone off to college myself after two years of living with an older sister. It was that sister’s grandchild that had become so much like me, little Ellie, but I’m getting ahead of myself. As the years went by, the memory of that long-ago summer faded more and more, but I still never forgot that first meeting and the way I’d felt upon my first sight of him.
It was years later, about twenty in fact, that our paths crossed again for the first time. I remember that hit in the gut feeling, that glitch in my heart at just the sight of his profile. My eyes hadn’t yet landed on the very pregnant woman walking next to him or the two toddlers by their side.
He hadn’t seen me yet, as he laughed at something the woman was saying. Maybe it was my stillness that caught his attention. A lone woman standing still on the sidewalk as everyone walked by. Or maybe it was the scent of the perfume, the only gift he’d ever bought me, that had caught his attention.
It was then I noticed the cigar when he turned and looked at me. And just for a split second in time, we were back in that dusty room. The air stood still around us; people ceased to exist as voices trailed off into nothingness. Our eyes met and held, and that love that I’d felt that day so long ago came rushing back.
Someone bounced into me, jarring me back to reality, and just like that, the spell was broken. Sound came crashing back in as movement started all around us. His eyes looked on in disbelief as if not believing what they were seeing. Then she turned to see what had taken his attention away. The smile fell from her face and was replaced with a scowl as she tugged on his arm.
He looked down at her, then back up at me, and the sadness I saw there was like a dagger to the heart. This goodbye was worst than the last. I knew that it was final, that if I’d had any hope of us having a fairytale ending, it had ended there.
That night he’d found me after all these years. He’d come to the old clapboard house I’d grown up in. I’d only been back for the first time to arrange my mother’s funeral. My older sisters were themselves getting up there in age, and so it was left to me, the youngest, the surprise baby to an almost fifty-year-old mother and a sixty-year-old father.
That night as he stood in the doorway beneath the moonlight, all the years of want and loneliness became overwhelming. We cried in each other’s arms that night. He told me of the many times he’d come by searching for that girl, the girl he now claimed stole his heart.
He told me the many lies my mother had told to keep us apart. That I’d gone off to be married, he’d stopped looking then. I never cried so much as I did that night. I was hurt and angry at my mother, who was no longer there to tell me why. I told him the truth, maybe to hurt him or her. My anger was such that I didn’t know and didn’t care.
I’d been robbed, and like any victim, I lashed out. I hated her, the woman he told me he’d married just a few short years after my mother’s lies. I hated that she had him when I couldn’t, but even then, I knew it wasn’t her fault. That it was unfair to blame her for something she played no part in. That night we said what I thought was our final goodbye.
We parted with much sorrow, our morals not allowing us to come together in that most basic of ways but knowing that we still longed for each other. It was only years later that I learned the truth. It was on one of my sparing visits to the home that I could never bring myself to sell.
I came every summer for a week or two. But this summer, some fifteen years or so after mom had passed, I decided to go through her old papers and such, and it was there I found the journal. I had no more intention than to relive a day in my mother’s life. To recall those genteel idyllic days of a time gone by.