Spencerville

After his post-Vietnam leave, he had less than a year of service remaining, but he'd decided to stay in a while longer, and requested and was accepted to Army Intelligence School in Fort Holabird, Maryland. This was an interesting field, and he actually enjoyed the work. He received orders for a second tour in the never-ending war, but this time as an intelligence analyst. He'd been promoted to captain, the pay was all right, the duty not bad. Better than combat, better than Spencerville, better than returning to a nation going crazy. They stopped corresponding, but he heard she'd dropped out of the doctorate program and traveled to Europe, then returned to Spencerville for a cousin's wedding. It was then, at the wedding, according to a friend who had been there, that she'd met Cliff Baxter. Apparently, they had a good time at or after the wedding, because they married a few months later. This was what he'd heard, anyway, but by that time, it was a subject he no longer wanted to be informed about.

Keith took the letter out of his pocket but couldn't read it in the fading light. Nevertheless, he stared at it and recalled most of it. The sentences, the words, were innocuous, but as a product of everything that had come before, it was everything he wanted to hear. He knew what it took for her to write that letter, he knew there was an element of danger for her to put it in his mailbox and to say that she'd stop by. And the danger was not only physical in the form of Cliff Baxter but emotional as well. Neither of them needed another disappointment or a broken heart. But she'd decided to take a chance, to in fact take the lead, and he liked that.

Keith put the letter in his pocket and plucked at the grass around him.

After he heard she was married, he put her out of his mind. That lasted about a week, and against his better judgment, he wrote her a short note of congratulations, care of her parents. She wrote a shorter note thanking him for his good wishes and asked him not to write again, ever.

He had always thought, and perhaps she thought, that they'd somehow get together again. In truth, neither of them could have forgotten the other. For six years, they'd been friends, soulmates, and lovers, and had formed each other's lives and personalities, shared the pains and happiness of growing up, and never imagined a life apart. But the world had finally intruded, and her letter made it clear that, indeed, it was now over between them, forever. But he never believed that.

After he was stationed in Europe, some months after her wedding, she wrote again, apologizing for the tone of her last letter, and suggested that writing was okay, but to please write care of her sister Terry in the next county.

He waited until he returned to the States, then wrote from Washington, saying little, except that he was back and would be at the Pentagon for a year or so. Thus began a two-decade-long correspondence, a few letters a year, updates, the births of her children, changes of address, his transfer to the Defense Department, her local news from Spencerville, his postings all over the world.

They had never exchanged photographs; neither had asked for a picture and neither had offered one. It was, Keith thought, as though they each wanted to hold on to the moving, living memory of the other, uncomplicated by a succession of rigid snapshots.

There had never been the hint of anything but an old and maturing friendship — well, perhaps once in a while, a letter written late at night with a line or two that could be taken as more than "Hello, how are you?" He wrote once from Italy, "I saw the Colosseum at night for the first time and wished you could have seen it, too."

She wrote back, "I did see it, Keith, when I was in Europe, and funny, I had the same thought about you."

But these types of letters were rare, and neither of them went too far out of bounds.

Whenever his address changed to some new, exotic locale, she wrote, "How I envy you all your traveling and excitement. I always thought I'd be the one leading the adventurous life, and you'd wind up in Spencerville."

He usually replied with words like, "How I envy you your stability, children, community."

He'd never married, Annie never divorced, and Cliff Baxter did not conveniently die. Life went on, the world moved forward.

He was in Saigon on his third tour when the North Vietnamese arrived in 1975, and he took one of the last helicopters out. He wrote to Annie from Tokyo, "I knew this war was lost five years ago. What fools we've all been. Some of my staff have resigned. I'm considering the same."

She replied, "When we played Highland, we were down 36-0 at the half. You went out there for the second half and played the best game I ever saw you play. We lost, but what do you remember best, the score or the game?"