The tin was still in one of the boxes.
The key fit.
Inside the drawer were tax records, receipts and photographs.
And underneath them was a stack of envelopes.
The first had my name on it.
So did the second, and the third.
Some had Australian stamps.
Some German.
Some Portuguese.
I sat on the basement floor.
Twenty-three letters.
Most were unopened letters my friends had sent me.
But near the bottom were three envelopes I recognized immediately.
My handwriting.
My stamps.
The letters I’d given my father to mail.
He hadn’t only stopped their words from reaching me.
He’d stopped mine from reaching them.
I opened the oldest. Near the bottom, 18-year-old me had written, “Don’t forget about me over there.”
Suddenly, I was 18 again, standing beside our mailbox while he told me those boys had their own lives.
My father hadn’t merely watched me wait. He’d known.
Beneath the letters was an envelope with my name on it, written in my father’s hand.
It wasn’t sealed.
Inside was a letter he’d apparently started years later and never found the courage to give me.
*You were going to leave. First Australia, then wherever the others went.*
*The store needed you.*
*Your mother needed you. I told myself that one day you’d understand why I kept those letters.*
I read it until the words blurred.
My father had been terrified I’d leave.
Instead of telling me, he’d made the decision for me.
He didn’t need to hide letters forever.
Only long enough.
By the time I moved out, the damage was done.
My friends believed I’d rejected them.
I believed they’d forgotten me.
After enough unanswered letters, hurt did what my father had counted on. We stopped trying.
I was furious.
But anger had nowhere to go.
My father had been dead for 26 years.
Tommy was dead, and so was Ray.
There are some things an apology cannot restore because everyone who deserves to hear it is already gone.
But Nick wasn’t.
And I wasn’t going to lose whatever time we had left.
***
Three weeks later, I stepped off a plane in Portugal.
Luis met me at the airport.
Nick lived with his wife in a small house overlooking the sea.
During the drive, I barely spoke.
“What if he doesn’t recognize me?” I finally asked.
Luis laughed.
“He will.”
Nick was sitting beside a window when I walked into the room.
He was thin.
Much thinner than the boy in my memory.
His hair was white, his hands spotted with age, and an oxygen tube ran beneath his nose.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then his eyes moved over my face.
A small smile appeared. “You took your time.”
I laughed.
It came out as a sob.
Nick’s smile trembled.
Then he held out his hand.
I crossed the room and took it, but that wasn’t enough.
I bent down and hugged him.
Nick’s arms came around me.
And suddenly 55 years disappeared.
Not completely. Nothing could ever give them back.
But for a moment I could smell lake water and summer grass, and I could hear Tommy arguing with Ray while four boys promised one another something none of us understood would become important.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Nick pulled back.
“For what?”
“For not finding you.”
He shook his head.
“We didn’t find you either.”
“My father took the letters.”
Nick went still as I told him everything.
About the drawer.
The 23 envelopes.
The note.
When I finished, Nick stared through the window for a long time.
“So you didn’t leave us.”
“No.”
He squeezed my hand.
“We didn’t leave you either.”
I had brought the old letters with me to Portugal.
I pulled out one of my own unsent letters and handed it to Nick.
He read the line I’d written at 18.
“Don’t forget about me over there.”
Nick closed his eyes.
“Harold,” he said quietly, “we never did.”
Those words hurt more than anything I’d read in the boxes.
Because they gave me exactly what I’d wanted at 18.
Only 55 years late.
We talked for hours. About Tommy, about Ray.
About marriages and children and jobs and mistakes.
Nick told me Tommy had kept that useless red lure through six house moves.
Ray had carried his compass to Germany, then kept it in his desk for the rest of his life.
Nick still had the knife.
“I wanted you to have it,” he said.
I reached into my bag.
“I brought something too.”
His eyebrows lifted.
I placed a small wooden object in his palm.
A carved fish.
I’d made it in shop class when I was 16.
We used to joke that it was the only fish Tommy’s lure would ever catch.
I’d kept it for more than half a century.
Nick stared at it.
Then he laughed so hard Luis came in to check on him.
We had 55 years of friendship to catch up on, and we weren’t finished yet.
***
A month later, we arranged one more meeting.
Not at the lake because Nick couldn’t travel.
So we brought the lake to him.
Oscar flew in with Tommy’s red lure.
Anna brought Ray’s compass.
I brought the carved fish.
Nick’s pocketknife was already there.
We placed all four objects on the table beside his window.
Four pieces of four boys’ lives. Together again.
We took a photograph.
Oscar said his father would have loved it.
Anna said hers would have complained that we put the compass upside down.
Nick looked at me.
“Fifty-five years,” he said.
“We kept the promise.”
I looked at the empty chairs around us.
“Not exactly.”
Nick shook his head.
“They sent their children, Harold. I’d say that counts.”
I cannot recover the years my father took from us.
I cannot sit beside that lake with Tommy or hear Ray complain about getting old. But I know now that they remembered me.
They missed me.
They wanted me.
And somewhere in Australia and Germany, children grew up hearing stories about a fourth boy beside a lake.
A boy their fathers never stopped calling their friend.
Before I left Portugal, Nick handed me the pocketknife.
“Take it back,” he said.
“Where?”
He looked at me as if the answer were obvious.
