and drove to an aging trailer beside a county road. Two weeks later, while hanging wet sheets behind that trailer, she saw a black limousine stop beside her mailbox. A gray-suited attorney stepped onto the gravel carrying a sealed envelope with Garrett’s handwriting across the front.
Garrett had reappeared in Eleanor’s life at a church bake sale fifty-three years after they first fell in love behind the high school bleachers. Both were widowed, both had lived full lives, and both recognized immediately that the old affection had survived the distance between 1972 and their seventies. Six months later, Garrett proposed on Eleanor’s porch, promising at last to give her the diamond ring he had once spoken about as a teenage boy. His children, Margaret and Daniel, never accepted the marriage and repeatedly questioned what Eleanor expected to inherit from their father’s considerable estate.
