C.B. Forrest days into my sentence, the bride visited me at the regional detention centre. She came to ask a single question. She stared at me through the scratched Plexiglass window, holding the greasy black telephone receiver as though it were a Conch. The visiting room was filled with children with teething rashes splotched on their cheeks and their mothers who invariably wore the same look of exasperation. The newlywed appeared much healthier than the last time I had spotted her bending over a trash container, but I opted against saying as much. She was nervous, I could tell, and she said simply, “Why?” A good question. The only one I could answer, in fact. I was unable to hold her glare and so my eyes dropped to the cheap set of state-provided running shoes with the Velcro fasteners in place of the laces that we might use to end our miserable lives. “Afternoon recess,“ I said. “June sixteenth, 1987.” She blinked. “Behind the brown portables,” I clarified. She squinted, and said, “What are you talking about, Jerry?” I drew a long breath, closed my eyes, and for the millionth time summoned forth the memory of that day. The smell of her recently applied watermelon lip gloss, the anticipation of summer, smells of wild flowers and freshly cut grass, the whole rest of our lives spread before us like an all-youcan-eat buffet. “The second last day of school,” I went on. “We promised each other we‟d get married. Does that ring any bells?” Her grip tightened on the phone. Her knuckles blanched. “It was sixth grade, Jerry,” she said. “We were eleven, okay? And anyway, you moved away that summer when your dad got transferred.” “A promise is a promise,” I said with a shrug. Her eyes searched me. “You never wrote,” she said, as though it explained everything. “We didn‟t even stay in touch.” “I did for a little while. Your mother probably threw my letters away. She never liked me. Anyway, I assumed after college I would come back and we‟d get married. Like we promised. And then I did come back, you know, and I found out you were already engaged. It broke my heart, to be honest.” She shook her head. She said, “My mother always said you were so intense.” “I‟m a man of my word. In today‟s flip-flop world, that has to be worth something.” She sighed. “You ruined my wedding day because of a promise I made when I was eleven?” It wasn‟t a question so much as a statement of the facts. The anger and confusion seemed to have been replaced in that moment by something else entirely. I could see that she was recalling those long ago days when we were
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