I had to sit down, because inside that napkin was a gold locket, and when I worked the little clasp and it fell open, two tiny photographs looked back at me: Raymond on one side, and me on the other, both of us sixteen and glowing.
I had never seen that locket in my life. But I knew those pictures. They were cut from a photo Marge took of the two of us our very first summer, the summer we met, the summer of that first dance.
It took me a while to understand, and then it warmed me right through. Marge had made that locket herself, or had it made, from a picture of two kids she watched fall in love in her diner. She must have meant to give it to me someday and never found the moment, or lost her nerve, or simply run out of time. So she had hidden it in the jukebox, the keeper of all our best nights, and trusted it to reach me.
Fifty years that woman stood behind her counter and watched the young ones come and go, and she had chosen to make a keepsake of us, Raymond and me, which told me she had known all along that what she witnessed that first summer was something that would last.
It did last. Forty-two years of marriage. A locket, sixty years in the making, finally around my neck.
I have not taken it off since. It rests right at my collarbone, Raymonds young face and my young face pressed close together the way we were pressed close on the dance floor, the way we stayed close all our lives.
With Patsy Cline playing, I sat and held that locket and thanked Marge out loud, though she is years gone, for seeing us, for saving us, for believing in two shy kids enough to make a treasure of them.
When my time comes, I have asked that the locket go to my granddaughter, who has her grandfathers eyes. I want her to carry us with her, Raymond and me at sixteen, forever young inside a little gold heart that waited out the decades in the dark of a jukebox, patient as love itself.