He wrote that our friendship mattered too much to him to let it turn into something that hurt somebody else.
And then:
I hope you have a wonderful life, Ruthie.
I’m sorry.
Jeffrey.
What I Did About It
I cried for about three weeks. My mother thought I had mono.
But I respected it.
I didn’t write back. I didn’t call. I never drove out there, though I sat in my car with the keys in the ignition twice.
He’d asked. And I was twenty-one and I believed that when somebody asks you for something like that, you give it to them.
What I Heard Over the Years
Pieces, mostly. Through people who still knew his family.
That he and Margaret had a boy. That he’d gone into commercial insurance and done well at it. That they’d moved out toward Harrisburg.
Then even those updates stopped, sometime in the mid-nineties.
What I Did With the Next Four Decades
I taught eighth grade English for thirty-one years.
