“I think you should go inside.”
“That swing.”
My voice broke.
“Walter made that when we were seventeen.”
Samuel said nothing.
I walked toward it.
Fifty-six years disappeared.
Walter and I had grown up in Bellweather, Ohio, a town so small that everybody knew who kissed whom before the people doing the kissing had decided what it meant. We met when we were fifteen, became inseparable at sixteen, and by seventeen had planned an entire life with the confidence available only to teenagers who had never paid a mortgage.
A little white house.
Blue shutters.
Vegetable garden.
Three children.
Walter wanted four.
I wanted two.
We compromised at three despite having no idea how children worked.
And a porch.
Always the porch.
Walter built a miniature version of the swing in his father’s workshop and gave it to me on my seventeenth birthday.
“One day I’ll make the real one.”
