They grow old and one of them dies and the other stands at the grave grieving a person they had lost, without ever knowing it, twenty-five years before — and they call it a long marriage, and mean it kindly.

We almost had that.

We almost had the long marriage that is really a long loneliness with a shared address.

And instead, because of a spilled box and a widow’s mercy and a slow song in a kitchen, we got the real thing back, the thing we’d promised and forgotten we’d promised.

We found our way back across the whole cold distance of a long marriage, and we did it in time — barely, luckily, gratefully in time — with years still on the clock to spend on each other. Save me every slow one for the rest of your life, he wrote me when we were young.

It took us forty years and a shoebox to remember.

But we’re dancing again now, Hal and I, out of step and stepping on each other and holding on tight, in our kitchen, on our porch, on an old wooden floor on Saturday nights — dancing every slow one we’ve got left, at last, on purpose, in time.

THE END.