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I expected five decades to have erased a promise four teenagers made beside a lake. Instead, three boxes were waiting on our old bench, each with my name on it, and nothing inside them was what I expected.
I knew something was wrong before I reached our old bench.
I could see it through the trees, exactly where we’d left it 55 years ago.
Nobody was sitting there.
I’d prepared myself for that possibility. Three old friends scattered across three countries had plenty of reasons not to remember a promise we’d made at 17.
What I hadn’t prepared for were the three boxes waiting on the bench.
Each one had my name on it.
HAROLD.
The bench was smaller than I remembered, its boards gray and weathered, but four initials were still carved into one end.
H. T. R. N.
I ran my thumb over them.
We had carved those initials there the night we graduated high school in 1970.
Tommy, Ray, Nick, and me.
That night, we’d sat beside the lake until nearly midnight, talking about everything we were going to do with our lives.
Tommy’s family was moving to Australia. Ray wanted to see Europe.
Nick swore he’d marry the first beautiful woman who laughed at his terrible jokes.
I wasn’t going anywhere. My father owned a hardware store in town and expected me to work beside him.
I’d talked about joining Tommy in Australia someday. My father always changed the subject.
Before we left the lake, Tommy made us promise something.
“Fifty-five years,” he said. “Same day. Same bench.”
Ray laughed.
“We’ll be 72.”
“Then bring your walking stick.”
We stacked our hands together like excited children.
Fifty-five years later, we’d come back.
At 17, none of us doubted we would.
***
For a while, we stayed close.
Tommy wrote from Australia. Ray sent letters from Germany. Nick eventually settled in Portugal.
Then the letters became less frequent.
Then they stopped.
I wrote too.
At first, I’d leave my letters on the hall table for my father to mail when he drove into town for the store. After a while, when nothing came back, I stopped giving him any.
Eventually, silence begins to feel like an answer.
I married, had two children, buried my parents, lost my wife six years ago, became a grandfather, and grew old in the same town where we’d all started.
But I never forgot the lake. I went back many times over the years.
Sometimes I’d sit on our bench and trace those four initials, remembering the boys we’d been and wondering where life had taken them.
And every time, I’d think about our promise and hope that somehow, when the 55 years were finally up, they’d remember it too.
Apparently, they had.
***
The boxes were different sizes.
My hands were shaking when I opened the first.
I lifted out the red fishing lure, and laughed before I could stop myself.
Tommy had bought it when we were 16.
He’d spent three weeks bragging that it would catch the biggest bass in the lake.
It never caught anything.
Underneath it was an envelope.
The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the first sentence wasn’t.
*Harold,*