I unwrapped that old malt-shop napkin right there in my sunroom, and I had to sit down, because inside was a jackknife and a folded note, and the knife I knew, because it had belonged to my Vernon.
The man who owned that malt shop for forty-four years, a fellow named Angelo, had left the note, and it explained a thing I never knew.
Vernon carved our initials under that table the day he asked me to go steady, in 1962. What I did not know is that Angelo caught him doing it. But instead of throwing the boy out for defacing his furniture, Angelo did something else. He asked Vernon to leave the knife.
For forty-four years Angelo let the young people carve their initials into the underside of that corner table, and every time a boy pulled out his knife to mark his sweethearts name, Angelo asked to keep the knife, and he saved it in the base of the bench, so that the tools of a whole generation of first loves were hidden under the seat where they happened.
His note said a malt shop by a school sees every young romance in town, and that a table full of carved initials was the truest record of a place he could think of. He wrote that he kept the knives because a boy brave enough to carve a girls name deserved to have that brave little knife saved, and that whoever bought the corner booth would find the blade that started their own initials.
Vernon and I had forty-one years. I lost him a while back. And I sat in my sunroom holding the very knife he used to carve our names when we were teenagers, saved for sixty years by a kind man behind a malt counter.
I turned that booth over and found the carving, still there under the table, V plus me in a boys shaky hand, 1962. I ran my fingers over it and I could taste the cherry Cokes and hear Angelo hollering that it was closing time.
The knife sits framed in my sunroom now, over the booth, next to our initials.
I bought back the corner booth of my whole young life because the seat was torn. It came with the very blade my Vernon carved our love with, kept safe for me by a malt-shop man who understood that a boy carving a girls name is one of the finest things a town ever does, and ought to be saved.