It Happened on Maple Street

As I’d come to expect, there was an e-mail from Tim waiting. What I didn’t expect was for it to turn me inside out all over again.

Tara: Have u ever heard this song? This is exactly how I feel about u.

I have been listening to it a lot lately and now want share it with u.

Please listen carefully to the words.

Tim

I listened. And started to cry—the first tears I’d shed all week. The song was about heaven—how he’d found heaven with me in the past, and now again in the present. About holding me in his arms. About how there was nothing that could ever come between us again. I loved this man so much. But I wasn’t the girl he’d known. I wasn’t capable of the things we’d shared back then.

I had to tell him.

I struggled for two days, pretending that everything was fine. And then, on Tuesday, he sent another message that changed everything yet again.

Tara,

I may be in Atlanta next week. Any book shows there by chance? I thought you’d said you had something coming up there. Write back or call if you want to talk about it . . . see you.

That was it. No signature. Nothing. But he’d sent that song on Saturday. He said he listened to it all the time.

That he felt exactly as the song said. It said nothing could take me away from him. It said I was all he wanted. It said he found love in me. It said I was his once in a lifetime.

He was going to Atlanta. He wanted me to meet him there.

We were more completely in each other’s lives than either of us had been with the partners we’d lived with, and we hadn’t set sight on each other for twenty-seven years.

I wanted to ignore the post.

I hit reply.

Tim,

As a matter of fact, I did have an invitation for Atlanta from my publicist. It’s an invitation from a bookseller there who wants to do an event. Is it worth following up on?

Tara

What in the hell was I doing? I couldn’t see Tim in person. He’d know just how much I’d changed. And he’d know that there was no future for us in the way he was obviously envisioning.

Tim wanted to finish what we’d started thirty years before. He wanted to go all the way.

My body was no longer capable of arousal.

But Tim had asked me to meet him, and I hadn’t been able to tell him no. I needed to see him.

Tim had to sit down when he read Tara’s email. He’d thrown Atlanta out there as an off chance, built out of his growing urgency to see her in person. He needed to look her in the eye, touch her, to feel her touch to make sure she was real and not some illusion he was building in his dreams. He was beginning to feel as awkward and tied up as he had at eighteen.

She was so skittish, he’d expected excuses. Or an out-and-out negative. Not this tentative yes.

How romantic would it be if they could meet over Valentine’s Day? If they could make this Atlanta thing work?

How terrible if they made plans and she got cold feet? He had to keep it casual. Friends only. Until she was ready for more. Until he knew what had hurt his Tara so badly so could help her heal.

His whole heart was on the line here—in a way his whole life was— and one way or another, it was time to take the next step. Even if he had to fly to Albuquerque.

Atlanta would be easier. And quicker. She was considering it. If he pressured her he might blow the whole thing.

He took his time to write her back.