When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.

stamps go up through four decades. There are three different postcodes for me on them, because he found out when I moved. He never wrote to me. He found out where I lived and he addressed an envelope and he put it in a shoebox.

And the one on the top was written on Tuesday. That day. In handwriting that has almost nothing left of the handwriting I knew.

***LORNA — 60***

He had written it in the morning, from a hospital bed, with a stamp already on it, on the day the promise came due.

And underneath the whole stack, flat on the bottom of the box, folded into four, was a photocopy of a birth certificate.

And my forty-one years, since I have just described his in one paragraph.

I worked at Rowe’s Mill library for thirty-four years. I was assistant, then senior, then the one who ran it,