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 4 — NOVEMBER
She never gave it to me.
She could not, because giving it to me meant explaining where it came from, and she had just asked a nineteen-year-old boy to disappear for a year and she was not going to have that in the house.
In the November of 1986 she wrote to him at college.
She told him I was engaged.
I was not. I have never been engaged in my life.
I do not know why she wrote it and I am never going to, because she died in 2004 and I did not ask her a single useful question in eighteen years.
Gil believed it. He was twenty and he was three states away and it came from my mother.
He married Marianne Coyle in the spring of 1987 and they had thirty-one years and two sons and she died in 2018, and he has told me, and I believe him, that he was a good husband and that he loved her.
And the letter in the August of 1986 asking me never to write again was his, and he wrote it two weeks after my mother’s, and he wrote it in that order so that I would be angry with him and not go looking.
When she came to give him the guitar back, in that November, she said one sentence to him.
She wouldn’t want it from you.
He has had it for thirty-nine years. It has been in the loft of a house in Ashmere in a case with the catches shut.
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