Prologue

I sat at the end of the park bench solving a Time's crossword puzzle on my iPad. A quick glance down the walkway spotted Margaret limping toward me, leaning more heavily than usual on her cane. It was obvious from her halting steps that she wasn't having one of her better days. The arthritis in her hips caused her nearly constant pain but she refused to bow to it. She had been an active and busy person all her life and she was damned if she was going to sit at home in front of the boob-tube passively waiting for time to finish her off.

She eased herself down onto the other end of the bench with a little grunt of relief and got herself settled, retrieving the daily newspaper from her tote and perching the glasses suspended from a gold chain around her neck onto her nose. Before getting into the daily news, she leaned forward, looking up and down the walk for the expected friend who joined her in the park nearly every day.

I waited until she was a couple of paragraphs into a news item before interrupting her. "Would you like to guess how old I am?"

Margaret looked to be in her late sixties but I knew for a fact she was seventy-six. Even stressed from the constant pain, her face had that soft loveliness that beautiful women somehow manage to retain as they age.

She wasn't in the mood for silliness on the part of total strangers and put some effort into looking annoyed at the interruption. She raised her eyes from her newspaper, looked both ways to verify I wasn't talking to someone else and answered, "No, I would not."

"Oh come on," I insisted. "Take a guess."

She closed her eyes and shook her head as she sighed, "Very well, if it will make you happy. Twenty-five. Now may I get back to my paper?"

"You're off by fifty- five years. I'm eighty."

She tilted her head forward to look at me over the wire rims of her glasses. A wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows and a little twinge of a smile turned up the corners of her mouth (it might have been a sneer) and she said, "Right! Well what can I say, my eyes aren't what they used to be," and went back to her reading.

"I suppose you're thinking I'm either lying through my teeth or some kind of a nut case, aren't you?"

Looking up again in exasperation, "Young man, your supposition tells me that you haven't completely lost touch with reality but frankly, I don't care if you're directly descended from Methuselah. Now, I'd be more than happy to walk away and leave you to this bench and your fantasies but I'm expecting a friend, so would you mind leaving me in peace?"

It was so hard for me not to laugh. I knew this woman and she knew me but she didn't know she knew me. We've been coming to the park and reading our newspapers on this very bench, weather permitting, every afternoon for over three years. We're both widowed, retired and have nothing but time on our hands.

The first few times we shared the bench, it was just, 'Good afternoon, nice day, isn't it?' Eventually we began to indulge in idle chitchat, sharing little bits and pieces of our lives. One day I brought lattes I'd picked up at Starbuck's on the way to the park and the next day she brought freshly baked scones. It had become a daily ritual and I knew there were four of the delicious treats in the tote sitting next to her. Our afternoons together became the high point of our days. Yesterday – that's yesterday to Margaret, not me - I finally worked up the courage to ask her out to dinner and she accepted. That pleased me no end because it gave me some hope that she might eventually agree to make our relationship more permanent.

Chapter 1 »