A week.
Forty-five years, and they were giving us a week.
But June just reached over and squeezed my hand, hard, her thin fingers digging into mine.
“Oh, wipe that look off your face, Gordie! You remember promising to marry me when we were seventeen?”
I nodded. My eyes were burning.
Of course I remembered.
It was October of our junior year, after the homecoming game. Ambrose Junction had lost by thirty points and nobody cared. We’d sat on the top row of the empty bleachers with a single bottle of root beer between us, watching the field lights shut off one by one. I’d worked the pull tab off the bottle cap and twisted the little metal ring around my finger until it was more or less round. Then I’d held it out to her.
“It’s not much,” I’d said, my voice cracking like a twelve-year-old’s. “But someday I’m going to marry you, June Bright. That’s a promise.”
