I unwrapped that old paper straw sleeve right there on my kitchen floor, and I had to sit down, because what fell out into my hand was a photograph and a note, and both of them were about me.
The photograph was of a young couple at that very fountain, at that very stool by the window, in 1961. A boy in a letter jacket sliding a cherry cola to a girl in a ponytail. It was Harold and me, the day he asked me to the spring dance, and I never even knew a picture of it existed.
The note was in old Mr. Dells handwriting.
Mr. Dell, who worked that counter for near fifty years, had watched a boy court a girl on that end stool in 1961, and he had quietly taken a picture of it, and he had hidden it inside the very stool where it happened, because some things a man sees across a soda fountain are too sweet to throw away.
He wrote that he kept a little camera behind the register and that over the years he had tucked away a photograph in that hollow stool of the couples he watched fall in love on it, the ones he had a feeling would last. He wrote that when the place finally closed, whoever loved that stool enough to buy it would find their own young self waiting inside.
He was right. He had a feeling about Harold and me, and he was right. We had forty years.
Mr. Dell has been gone a long while now. But that dear old man spent his working life not just pouring sodas but watching over the young people of this town, and marking the true things when he saw them, and saving the proof.
I got the photograph framed. It hangs in my kitchen, above the very stool I spun on as a girl, a boy and a girl and a cherry cola in 1961.
I sat on that stool the other evening with a cola of my own, and I looked up at the two of them, and I swear I could hear the fountain hiss and Mr. Dell say, I always knew about you two.
I bought back a piece of my girlhood for a few dollars because it wobbled. It came with the day my whole life began, saved for sixty years by a soda jerk with a soft heart and a hidden camera, waiting inside a red vinyl stool for me to come and find it.