She almost let it go unanswered, but answered anyway. The caller, Peter, introduced himself as Jeffrey’s son, explaining that his father didn’t have long to live and urgently needed to speak with her.
The Promise at Nineteen
Ruth and Jeffrey had been best friends since they were seventeen, never officially a couple. He dated other girls; she went to prom with someone else. Friends insisted they belonged together, but the two of them only laughed.
One summer evening, after two disappointing dates, they sat beneath the bleachers and made a deal. If they were both still single at sixty, Jeffrey said, extending his pinky, they’d stop being fools and find each other. Two months later he left for college three states away.
Their letters came often at first, then slower. By the time Ruth admitted to herself that she loved him, Jeffrey was already writing about a girl he’d met at school.
In the summer of 1986, his final letter arrived. He was getting married, and he asked her never to contact him again. Ruth cried for weeks, then did as he asked. She never married, and whenever anyone asked why, she simply said she’d never found the right man. It wasn’t the whole truth.
A Voice from the Past
On the phone, Peter’s voice gave way to rustling, then to a voice Ruth hadn’t heard in forty-one years. “Ruthie,” he said, and her eyes welled up. When she told him he’d remembered, he laughed faintly and said he’d remembered every birthday.
Then his voice cracked. He told her there was something she needed to know before he died: he had loved her when they made that promise, and he had already bought a ring, one he’d planned to give her before leaving for college.
Ruth froze. She asked why, then, he had married someone else. Jeffrey began to cry, saying that was exactly what he’d spent forty years wishing he could explain. He asked her to come to the hospital, telling her there was something she needed to see — something that would finally make sense of why he’d left.
Arriving at the Hospital
Forty minutes later, Ruth opened the door to his hospital room. Jeffrey lay in bed, thinner than the boy she remembered, but unmistakably himself.
It wasn’t Jeffrey, though, who made her gasp. It was what waited on the chair beside his bed.