It was from Tommy. The one who went to Australia.
Inside was a cricket ball, worn soft, and a photograph of a life I’d never seen — Tommy old, surrounded by children and grandchildren, on a beach under a hard bright sun. And a letter, in handwriting I somehow still recognized after fifty-five years.
“Harold. If you’re reading this, then you drove out to the lake, you stubborn old goat, and I knew you would. You were always the one who kept things.
I’m sorry I’m not there in person. I wanted to be. I planned to be, for years — I had it circled on every calendar I ever owned. But my heart’s not what it was, and the doctors won’t let me make the flight, and by the time you read this I may not be here at all to have tried.
So I sent myself instead. The best pieces of me. That cricket ball is from the first match I ever coached, forty years of Saturday mornings with other people’s kids, and every one of them I taught the way you four taught me what a friend is.
