At nineteen we promised that if we were both single at sixty we would find each other. I turned sixty on Tuesday, and the old landline rang.
PART 3 — THE SUMMER
Here is what Gil did in the summer of 1986, which I did not know until a Tuesday night at sixty years old.
He came to our house to ask my mother.
He was nineteen. He put a jacket on to do it. He had four hundred and eleven dollars saved from two summers at the cannery and a ring in his pocket from a shop in Ashmere.
And Adele Meade sat him down at our kitchen table and told him the truth about where we were.
We were losing that house. I did not know that either; I found out in the September when we moved to the flat over the chemist.
She told him I had a place on the nursing programme starting the following autumn and that I was going to give it up and go full-time at the plant.
And then she asked him — and he was very clear on the telephone that she asked, she did not tell — to give it a year.
Because if he proposed that summer, I was going to marry him instead of going, and she knew it, and so did he.
He agreed.
And then he went to Carrow Street with the ring money and bought my father’s guitar back off that shop for a hundred and forty dollars, and took it to my mother, and asked her to give it to me and not say where it came from.
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