I’m sorry I’m not there in person. I wanted to be. I planned to be, for years — I had it circled on every calendar I ever owned. But my heart’s not what it was, and the doctors won’t let me make the flight, and by the time you read this I may not be here at all to have tried.
So I sent myself instead. The best pieces of me. That cricket ball is from the first match I ever coached, forty years of Saturday mornings with other people’s kids, and every one of them I taught the way you four taught me what a friend is.
I never made another set of friends like you three. Not in fifty-five years, not on the other side of the world. You don’t, after seventeen. Nobody tells you that at seventeen. The friends you make at the lake are the last friends who’ll ever know the boy before the man.
I remembered, Harold. Every year. I remembered the bench. I remembered the promise. I remembered all of you, every day of a good long life I got to live because I once had three friends who made me brave enough to leave home and find it.
Thank you for going to the lake.
I knew one of us would.
I always knew it would be you.”
I cried on that bench like I hadn’t cried in years. And then, because there were two more boxes, and because Tommy would have called me a coward for stopping, I opened the next one.
PART 3
The second box was from Nick. Portugal.
Inside was a bottle of wine from a vineyard with his family’s name on the label — a whole life built in a country he’d found because he fell in love — and a small carved wooden boat, the kind we used to race on the lake as boys, made by his own hands. And a letter.
“Harold — I still spell it wrong, you always hated that, I did it on purpose for sixty years and I’m not stopping now.
