Apparently, they had.
The boxes were different sizes.
My hands were shaking when I opened the first.
I lifted out the red fishing lure, and laughed before I could stop myself.
Tommy had bought it when we were 16.
He'd spent three weeks bragging that it would catch the biggest bass in the lake.
It never caught anything.
Underneath it was an envelope.
The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the first sentence wasn't.
"Harold,"
"If you're sitting on our bench, you remembered."
I sat down.
The letter was from Tommy.
He had written it only seven months earlier.
He wrote about Australia, his wife, his children and grandchildren. He wrote that he'd spent years imagining the four of us as old men sitting beside the lake. Then came the sentence that stopped me.
"I wish we'd had the courage to ask you why you stopped writing."
"But if you came back to that bench, maybe I was wrong about you."
