Then I turned it over.
Near the bottom of the stem, written faintly in pencil, was a single letter.
J.
My breath stopped.
I knew that handwriting.
I would have known it after a hundred lifetimes.
James.
My husband.
The man who had disappeared fifty-six years earlier.
I dropped into the nearest chair so suddenly that its legs scraped loudly across the kitchen floor.
One of the real roses fell from the table.
“No,” I whispered.
“That can’t be possible.”
But the flower remained in my hand.
Old.
Fragile.
Real.
And bearing James’s initial.
For the first time in decades, a question I had spent half my life forcing myself not to ask rose inside me.
Could James somehow still be alive?
James and I had only been married for two days before he left.
Two days.
Yet somehow, those two days shaped the next fifty-six years of my life.
We married in my parents’ backyard while he was home on leave.
There were twenty-three guests, folding chairs borrowed from church, and a homemade wedding cake that leaned embarrassingly to one side.
My mother cried almost throughout the ceremony.
Later, James teased her while holding a paper cup of punch.
“Don’t cry, Mrs. Doyle. I’m only borrowing your daughter. I’m not stealing her.”
My mother lifted the cake knife toward him.
“You bring her back happy, James. Otherwise, you’ll answer to me.”
James looked across the yard at me in my yellow dress.
“That’s the plan,” he said.
“That’s the whole plan.”
We spent two wonderful days pretending our future was guaranteed.
We talked about buying a modest house.
Having children.
Maybe getting a dog.
Building a porch where we could sit when we were old.
On our first morning as husband and wife, James made the coffee ridiculously strong but drank it anyway because he refused to admit he had ruined it.
We walked through the neighborhood holding hands, feeling strangely grown-up because now we were officially married.
Then the third morning came.
His leave was over.
I stood beside him at the old downtown train station wearing the yellow cotton dress he loved.
He always said the color made me look like sunshine.
Before boarding the train, he pulled me into his arms.
“Next anniversary,” he whispered, “I’m buying you the biggest bouquet of yellow roses I can find. So many you won’t even be able to see over them.”
