It Happened on Maple Street

Tim,

I finally got in to get the message. It kept sending me to different places.

Of course I remember you! You were my first love—my first boyfriend. My mother and I were talking about you not long ago.

I was just in Ohio in October on book tour and drove by the Eaton exit and was telling my traveling companion about you.

No, not a famous reporter, but I’m a USA Today bestselling author, believe it or not!

There was more. Her mother was widowed and in Arizona. Tara was living in Albuquerque. Chum was dead.

And, about breaking your heart, I hope not. I was a kid breaking free of the binds my chauvinist father put on me, and you got caught in the backlash. I always cared about you, and the way I remember feeling, I would have come back in the end—I just didn’t know how to communicate that. I also wasn’t ever confident that you really loved me. My issue, not yours.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Tara

Of course I remember you, she’d written. Deep down he’d known she would. She wouldn’t forget him. How could she after all the things they’d done together?

Now he had to come up with some witty response. Could he keep her attention? He had to know details. Like, was she married? Did she have kids? Was she married? When was she traveling to his part of the country again? Was she married?

Was she happy without him?

He was going through a rough time. But just because he’d realized that most of his life’s unhappiness was tied up in his loss of her didn’t mean that she’d suffered similarly. She could be happily married.

But she’d said, I look forward to hearing from you. He read the words again.

I look forward to hearing from you. She must want him to write her back.

He hit reply and typed. There was so much to tell her. So much he had to say.

Whether she was happily married or not.

I didn’t close my e-mail program.

I grabbed up the three-hundred-page line-edited manuscript I had to make it through that day. I stared at all the scrawled handwriting, the changes my editor had made. And the notes she’d made in the margins—all issues I had to tend to. And I watched the e-mail icon in the bar at the bottom of my computer screen. Was a message coming in?

He could have had my message in seconds. And have had it read in another minute or two. Could be typing a reply . . .

Or he could be away from his desk.

I got up. Went into the bathroom. Came back out. Stepped outside the office for some warm desert sunshine on the cool January day.

I was forty-seven, not eighteen. I had a life. Had to think about where I wanted to live for the next month or so—I already knew where I going to settle. I was going to move to Phoenix where my mother was.

I visited her several times a year and loved it there. Even more than I loved Albuquerque.

I just had to figure out logistics. And I’d been away from my computer long enough.

Still nothing.

He might have read my reply and moved on. His having searched for me didn’t have to mean anything. With all of the social media available these days, people were commonly looking up old acquaintances, saying hi for old times’ sake, and moving on.

Just because they could.

Tim had been that once-in-a-lifetime spark for me. That didn’t mean I’d been that for him.

Or that it mattered, now. I was a very different woman from the girl he’d known.