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I reached into my bag.
“I brought something too.”
His eyebrows lifted.
I placed a small wooden object in his palm.
A carved fish.
I’d made it in shop class when I was 16.
We used to joke that it was the only fish Tommy’s lure would ever catch.
I’d kept it for more than half a century.
Nick stared at it.
Then he laughed so hard Luis came in to check on him.
We had 55 years of friendship to catch up on, and we weren’t finished yet.
***
A month later, we arranged one more meeting.
Not at the lake because Nick couldn’t travel.
So we brought the lake to him.
Oscar flew in with Tommy’s red lure.
Anna brought Ray’s compass.
I brought the carved fish.
Nick’s pocketknife was already there.
We placed all four objects on the table beside his window.
Four pieces of four boys’ lives. Together again.
We took a photograph.
Oscar said his father would have loved it.
Anna said hers would have complained that we put the compass upside down.
Nick looked at me.
“Fifty-five years,” he said.
“We kept the promise.”
I looked at the empty chairs around us.
“Not exactly.”
Nick shook his head.
“They sent their children, Harold. I’d say that counts.”
I cannot recover the years my father took from us.
I cannot sit beside that lake with Tommy or hear Ray complain about getting old. But I know now that they remembered me.
They missed me.
They wanted me.
And somewhere in Australia and Germany, children grew up hearing stories about a fourth boy beside a lake.
A boy their fathers never stopped calling their friend.