Chapter 7: Thursday
We walked for two hours.
The park was ordinary — gravel paths, a small pond, benches placed at intervals for people who needed to rest.
Thomas walked slowly, which suited me.
I had never been in a hurry and I saw no reason to start now.
We talked about small things first.
His flat in Edinburgh, which he had kept for thirty years.
My flat here, which I had moved into after George d*ed because the house had felt too large for one person.
His garden — he grew tomatoes, badly, and knew it.
My books — I read two a week still, always had.
"What did you do?" I asked.
"For work."
"Civil engineering.
Bridges, mostly.
I retired at sixty-eight." He glanced at me.
"You?"
"I taught primary school for thirty-one years.
Then I retired and taught myself to be bored, which took about three weeks, and then I started volunteering at the library."
"You still do?"
"Every Tuesday and Thursday morning.
The children's reading group."
He smiled at that — a real smile, slow and warm.
I recognized it.
It was the same smile.
Fifty years had not changed the shape of it.
We sat on a bench by the pond.
A pair of ducks moved across the water without urgency.
"Ruth apologized to me," I said.
"Properly.
She came to the flat on Monday."
"How did it go?"
"Badly at first.
I was still angry." I watched the ducks.
"Then better.
She was trying to protect me, the same way her grandmother was trying to protect me.
It seems to be a pattern in this family — the women deciding what I can and cannot handle."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her that I had survived losing you once and I was quite capable of surviving finding out you were alive." I paused.
"Then I told her I was glad she found you.
Because I am."
Thomas looked at the pond.
"I owe her a great deal," he said.
"Maya's school project.
A family tree." He shook his head slightly.
"Fifty years of searching and a seven-year-old's homework assignment."
"Maya told me she put your name on the tree because Ruth had a photograph of you and she thought you looked kind." I looked at him.
"She's not wrong."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"Do you regret it?
Your life.
The way it went."
I thought about it properly, the way the question deserved.
"No," I said.
"George was a good man and I loved him, not the way I loved you, but genuinely.
Ruth is — Ruth is my greatest achievement.
My grandchildren are extraordinary." I looked at my hands in my lap.
"I regret what was taken from us.
I don't regret what I built from what was left."
"That's a very honest answer."
"I'm eighty years old.
I've run out of patience for dishonest ones."
He laughed at that — a short, surprised sound — and it was so familiar that something in my chest moved in a way I hadn't felt in a very long time.
We sat by the pond for another half hour.
The afternoon light shifted.
The ducks came and went.
When we stood to leave, Thomas reached into his jacket pocket and held something out to me.
The gold ring.
The one Maya had placed in my hand at the party.
"I want you to have it back," he said.
"It was always yours.
I only kept it because it was the last thing I had."
I looked at it in his palm.
"You wore it on a chain for fifty years."
"Yes."
"Then you should keep it a little longer," I said.
"Until we've had more than one walk."
His hand closed around it.
We walked back along the gravel path toward the park gate, side by side, not touching, in no hurry at all.
At the gate he said, "Same time next week?"
"Same time next week," I said.
I walked home alone.
The evening was cool and the streetlights were beginning to come on, and I thought about a girl of thirty who had worn black for a year and could not say a name out loud, and I thought about what she would make of this — of two old people and a pond and a ring still in a pocket and a Thursday still to come.
May you like
I thought she would be glad.
I thought she had waited long enough to be.
