…it was a photograph of a young man on a dock, squinting into the sun, impossibly handsome, with the ocean behind him. She held it up so the whole picnic table could see.
“His name is Anton,” she said, sweet as pie, right at Rick. “I met him in the summer of 1962, when he came to teach a term at the school. We were going to marry.” She smoothed the photo with her thumb. “Then his father took ill back in Norway, and he had to go home and run the farm and care for his mother, and there was no bringing him back and no me leaving my own mother alone. So we made a different promise.”
She lifted the bundle of two hundred envelopes. “Every month for sixty-one years. He tells me about the fjord and his apple trees. I tell him about my students. I have loved that man across an ocean my entire life, and he has loved me back, and not one of you ever thought to ask.”
The table had gone dead silent. Rick’s grin was gone.
“His wife passed four years ago — yes, he married, and so his children got a father, and I don’t regret a day of the choice.” She reached back into the quilted purse and drew out one more photograph. Two old people on that same dock, last spring, hands clasped. “I flew to Norway in May. Eighty-four years old, first time on an airplane. We walked his orchard. And in September, he is coming here.”
My mother was crying. I was crying. Rick was studying the potato salad.
The woman they pitied every June for having no one had quietly loved one man more faithfully, and for far longer, than anybody at that table had ever managed to.