The Four Corners of Forever
Chapter 1: The Promise by the Lake
The summer of 1983 felt infinite when you were fifteen, stretched out like taffy in the humid Indiana heat. The lake behind Miller’s farm was our entire universe—sixty acres of murky water surrounded by cattails and wild raspberry bushes, with a dock that groaned under our weight and a bench that bore witness to our dreams.
I was Karen Sullivan then, all knobby knees and freckles, with hair that never stayed where I put it and a laugh that my mother said was too loud for a proper young lady. But sitting on that bench with my three best friends, proper didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the way the afternoon sun turned the water into liquid gold and made us all believe we’d be young forever.
“Promise me something,” Earl had said that last day of summer, his voice carrying that serious tone he only used when he’d been thinking hard about something. He was sitting on the end of the bench, one leg folded under him, picking at the label on his Coca-Cola bottle.
“What kind of promise?” Dale asked, always the cautious one even at fifteen. His dark hair was still wet from swimming, and he was trying to comb it down with his fingers while water dripped onto his shoulders.
“The kind that matters,” Earl replied. He looked at each of us in turn—me, Dale, and Wes—his blue eyes unusually solemn. “Promise me that in forty years, we’ll meet back here. Right here on this bench. All four of us.”
Wes, who was usually content to let the rest of us do the talking, looked up from the fishing line he was untangling. “Forty years is a long time.”
“That’s the point,” Earl said. “We’ll be old—like, really old. Fifty-five years old. Can you imagine? We’ll probably have gray hair and wrinkles and everything.”
I laughed, trying to picture myself as an ancient fifty-five-year-old. It seemed impossibly far away, like trying to imagine what it would feel like to live on the moon.
“What if we forget?” I asked.
“We won’t forget,” Earl said with the absolute certainty that only fifteen-year-olds possess. “Some things you don’t forget. Like this.” He gestured toward the lake, the bench, the four of us sitting there with our toes in the sand and the whole world spread out before us.
Dale pulled out his pocket knife and started carving something into the weathered wood of the bench. “There,” he said, stepping back to admire his handiwork. Four sets of initials: K.S., D.M., W.P., E.J.
“Now it’s official,” Earl said, grinning. “Forty years from today. August fifteenth, 2023. Right here.”
We all shook hands, formal as a business transaction, and then dissolved into giggles because shaking hands felt so adult and important.
“What do you think we’ll be like?” I wondered aloud, leaning back against the bench and closing my eyes against the sun.
“Rich,” Dale said immediately. “I’m going to have so much money I won’t know what to do with it all.”
“Famous,” Earl added. “I’m going to be a race car driver or a rock star or something. People will know my name everywhere I go.”
Wes was quiet for a moment, then said, “Happy. I just want to be happy.”
We all looked at him, surprised by the simplicity of his answer and a little uncomfortable with how honest it was.
“That’s a good one,” I said finally. “I want to be happy too. And married to someone who makes me laugh every day.”
“Gross,” Dale said, but he was smiling.
“What about kids?” Earl asked. “Do you think we’ll have kids?”
“Probably,” I said. “I want three. Two girls and a boy.”
“I want five,” Earl announced. “A whole baseball team.”
“I want none,” Dale said firmly. “Kids are expensive and loud and they mess up your stuff.”
We all looked at Wes again, waiting for his answer.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Maybe. If I can be the kind of dad who doesn’t yell.”
There was something in his voice that made the rest of us go quiet. We all knew about Wes’s father, about the shouting that sometimes carried across the yard when we were playing outside his house, about the way Wes sometimes flinched when adults raised their voices.
“You’ll be a great dad,” I said, reaching over to squeeze his hand. “The best kind.”
He smiled at me, the kind of smile that reached all the way to his eyes and made my stomach flip in a way I didn’t quite understand yet.
The sun was starting to set, painting the sky in shades of pink and orange that would have looked fake in a painting but seemed perfectly natural reflected in the lake water.
“We should go,” Dale said reluctantly. “My mom said to be home by dark.”
“Five more minutes,” Earl pleaded. “Just five more.”
We sat there in comfortable silence, watching the dragonflies skim across the water and listening to the bullfrogs warming up for their evening concert. The air smelled like honeysuckle and the faint fish-scent of the lake, and everything felt perfect in the way that only summer evenings can feel when you’re fifteen and the future is nothing but possibility.
“Forty years,” Earl said again, softer this time.
“Forty years,” we echoed.
And then we gathered our fishing poles and empty soda bottles and walked back toward our bikes, not knowing it would be the last time we’d all be together like that for four decades.
Chapter 2: The Scattering
The thing about growing up is that it happens so gradually you don’t notice it’s happening until one day you look around and realize you’re not fifteen anymore. The changes crept in slowly—senior year of high school, college applications, the gradual shift from “see you tomorrow” to “see you soon” to “we should really keep in touch.”
I was the first to leave, heading to nursing school at Indiana University in the fall of 1986. The night before I left, Wes and I sat on the dock behind his house, our feet dangling in the water, talking about everything and nothing the way we always had.
“I’m going to miss this,” I said, gesturing toward the lake that had been the backdrop for so many of our adventures.
“I’m going to miss you,” Wes said quietly, and there was something in his voice that made me look at him more carefully.
The moonlight was reflecting off the water, and in that soft light, Wes didn’t look like the shy boy I’d grown up with. He looked like someone on the verge of saying something important, something that might change everything between us.
“Wes,” I started, but he shook his head.
“I know,” he said. “You’re going to college. You’re going to meet new people and have new adventures and become someone amazing. I just wanted you to know that these have been the best years of my life. These summers with you and Dale and Earl—they’ve been perfect.”
I felt tears prick at the corners of my eyes. “They’ve been perfect for me too.”
“Promise me we’ll stay friends,” he said. “I know things will change, but promise me we’ll always be friends.”
“Always,” I promised, and I meant it with every fiber of my being.
But life has a way of making promises harder to keep than you expect when you’re eighteen and full of good intentions.
College was everything I’d hoped it would be—challenging and exciting and full of new experiences. I threw myself into my studies, made new friends, joined clubs, dated boys who were nothing like the ones I’d grown up with. I wrote letters to Wes and Dale and Earl at first, long rambling accounts of dorm life and difficult professors and the way everything in Bloomington was so different from home.
Their letters back were shorter, less frequent. Dale had started working at his father’s hardware store and was dating a girl named Lisa who took up most of his free time. Earl had gotten a job at the auto plant and was talking about joining the Army. Wes was still living at home, working construction and taking care of his mother, who had developed arthritis that made it hard for her to get around.
By sophomore year, the letters had dwindled to Christmas cards. By junior year, even those had stopped.
I graduated in 1990 and took a job at a hospital in Fort Wayne, telling myself I’d go back to visit soon, that I’d reconnect with my old friends once I got settled. But settling took longer than I expected, and by the time I felt established in my new life, going home felt more complicated than it should have.
I met Jack Morrison in 1993 at a church potluck dinner where I’d volunteered to help serve food to families in need. He was a carpenter with kind eyes and gentle hands, and when he asked if he could call me sometime, I said yes without hesitation.
We were married two years later in a small ceremony at the Methodist church where we’d met. I sent wedding invitations to my three best friends from childhood, addressing them to their parents’ houses since those were the only addresses I had. Dale came, looking uncomfortable in a suit that didn’t quite fit, and gave me a brief hug before disappearing back into the crowd. Earl sent a card with a twenty-dollar bill inside and a note saying he was stationed in Germany and couldn’t make it home. Wes never responded at all.
Jack and I built a good life together. We bought a small house with a garden where I grew tomatoes and beans and enough herbs to supply the church kitchen. We tried for children but they never came, and after years of disappointment, we channeled our parental energy into being the aunt and uncle who always had room at the dinner table and cookies in the jar.
Jack died in 2018 after a brief battle with pneumonia that turned serious faster than anyone expected. I was sixty years old and suddenly alone in a way I’d never experienced before. The house felt too quiet, my days too empty, and for the first time in decades, I found myself thinking about the promise we’d made by the lake all those years ago.
- August fifteenth. Five years away.
I started planning almost immediately, not because I was sure anyone would show up, but because having something to look forward to gave shape to my grief. I hired a private investigator to help me track down current addresses for Dale, Wes, and Earl. It took three months and cost more money than I probably should have spent, but eventually I had phone numbers and mailing addresses for all three of them.
Dale was still in our hometown, running the hardware store his father had left him. He’d married Lisa, the girl he’d been dating in high school, and they had two grown children and three grandchildren. When I called him, his voice sounded exactly the same as it had when we were teenagers.
“Karen? Karen Sullivan? Well, I’ll be damned. How long has it been?”
“Too long,” I said. “Dale, do you remember the promise we made? By the lake?”
There was a pause, and then he laughed. “Forty years. Jesus, Karen, has it really been that long?”
“Almost. August fifteenth, 2023. Are you going to be there?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he said without hesitation. “I’ll bring the thermos.”
Wes was harder to reach. The investigator had found him in Chicago, where he’d moved after his mother died. He was a building contractor, the report said, with a wife named Margaret and three children. When I finally got him on the phone, he was quiet for a long moment after I identified myself.
“Karen,” he said finally, and his voice was exactly as I remembered it—warm and careful and full of kindness. “I wondered if you’d remember.”
“How could I forget?”
“I wasn’t sure anyone would want to see me again. It’s been so long, and I never was good at keeping in touch.”
“Wes, you were my best friend. That doesn’t just disappear because time passes.”
I could hear him take a shaky breath. “I’ll be there,” he said. “I’ve thought about that promise every August fifteenth for forty years.”
Earl was the hardest to find, and when the investigator finally located him, I understood why. He was living in a small apartment in Indianapolis, divorced twice with no children, working as a night security guard at a medical complex. When I called, he sounded older than I’d expected, tired in a way that went beyond physical exhaustion.
“Earl Johnson speaking,” he answered, his voice formal and careful.
“Earl, it’s Karen. Karen Sullivan from—”
“Karen,” he interrupted, and suddenly his voice was filled with warmth. “My God, Karen. I can’t believe you found me.”
“I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t try.”
We talked for an hour that first call, catching up on forty years of life in the way you can only do with someone who knew you when you were young and believed you could do anything. Earl told me about his stint in the Army, his failed marriages, his struggles with drinking that he’d finally gotten under control five years earlier.
“I’m not the same person I was when we were kids,” he warned me. “Life’s been harder than I thought it would be.”
“Life’s been hard for all of us,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.”
“You really want to see me again? Even knowing I turned out to be kind of a mess?”
“Earl, you were never a mess. You were the one who believed in magic, who made the rest of us think anything was possible. That person is still in there somewhere.”
When August fifteenth, 2023 finally arrived, I got up early and made a batch of chocolate chip cookies, the same recipe I’d been using since I learned it from my grandmother when I was twelve. I packed them in a tin along with a thermos of coffee and drove the hour and a half back to the lake where it all began.
The bench was still there, weathered and gray but solid, our initials still faintly visible under forty years of weather and wear. I sat down and waited, watching the water and trying not to think about how different we’d all be now, how much life had changed us since we were fifteen and fearless.
Chapter 3: The Reunion
Dale arrived first, pulling up in a pickup truck that had seen better days but was clearly well-maintained. He climbed out slowly, favoring his left knee in a way that suggested arthritis or an old injury, and for a moment I didn’t recognize him. The boy I’d remembered was tall and lanky with dark hair that never stayed combed. The man walking toward me was shorter and rounder, with silver hair and laugh lines around his eyes that spoke of a life lived with good humor despite its challenges.
But when he smiled, he was exactly the same person he’d always been.
“Karen Sullivan,” he said, opening his arms wide. “Look at you, still pretty as a picture.”
“Still full of it, I see,” I replied, stepping into his embrace. He smelled like coffee and aftershave and something distinctly masculine that made me think of sawdust and honest work.
“Some things never change,” he agreed, releasing me and stepping back to look at me properly. “You look good, Karen. Really good. Life’s been treating you well?”
“It’s had its moments,” I said. “Both good and bad. What about you? Still running the hardware store?”
“Every day for the past twenty-five years,” he said with a mixture of pride and resignation. “It’s not glamorous, but it’s honest work and it pays the bills. Lisa says I should retire, but what would I do with myself? Sit around and watch game shows all day?”
Before I could answer, another vehicle pulled into the parking area—a well-maintained sedan that suggested its owner had done better financially than either Dale or I had managed. The man who got out was tall and lean, with silver hair that was still thick and the kind of tan that came from spending time outdoors by choice rather than necessity.
“Wes?” I called, uncertain.
He turned toward us and smiled, and suddenly I was fifteen again, looking at the boy who had been my closest friend and maybe something more.
“Hello, Karen,” he said, walking over with the same careful, measured pace I remembered. “You look exactly the same.”
“Liar,” I said, but I was pleased by the compliment anyway.
“No, I mean it. You have the same smile, the same eyes. You just look like a more polished version of yourself.”
Dale stepped forward and shook Wes’s hand with the kind of hearty enthusiasm that covered up forty years of lost time.
“Look at you, all successful and everything,” Dale said, gesturing toward the expensive car. “Did you strike it rich up there in Chicago?”
Wes looked embarrassed. “I did okay. Construction work paid well, and I was always good with numbers. I started my own company about fifteen years ago.”
“That’s wonderful, Wes,” I said, meaning it. “I always knew you’d do well for yourself.”
“What about kids?” Dale asked. “The investigator Karen hired said you had three.”
“Two boys and a girl,” Wes confirmed, his face lighting up in a way that transformed his entire appearance. “The boys are both in college now, and my daughter just graduated high school. She’s starting at Northwestern in the fall.”
“You must be proud,” I said.
“Every day,” he replied. “They’re good kids. Better than I probably deserved.”
We stood there for a moment, three old friends catching up on forty years of life, and I found myself looking around for the fourth member of our group.
“Earl’s not here yet,” I said, trying to keep the worry out of my voice.
“Maybe he’s running late,” Dale suggested. “You know Earl—he was never the most punctual guy in the world.”
But as the minutes stretched into an hour, and the hour stretched toward two, it became clear that something was wrong. We tried calling the number I had for him, but it went straight to voicemail. We waited and talked and reminisced, but the empty space on the bench where Earl should have been sitting grew more noticeable with each passing minute.
“Maybe we should drive over to his apartment,” Wes suggested. “Make sure he’s okay.”
I was about to agree when Dale spotted something that made us all go quiet.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing toward the far end of the bench.
There, tucked neatly between two of the wooden slats, was an envelope. It was cream-colored and looked like it had been there for a while, protected from the weather by its placement but showing signs of age around the edges.
“To Karen, Dale, and Wes,” I read aloud, recognizing Earl’s handwriting despite the way it had changed over the years—shakier now, more careful, as if each letter required conscious effort.
Wes picked up the envelope with trembling hands and opened it carefully. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded twice, with Earl’s familiar handwriting covering both sides.
“Dear friends,” Wes read aloud, his voice steady despite the emotion I could see building in his eyes. “I wanted so badly to see you. I really did. I thought I could make it, but life had other plans.”
He paused, swallowing hard before continuing.
“I won’t say why I can’t be there. Some things are better left quiet. Just know I think of you all often. I carry those lake summers in my chest like a second heart. Be well. Be joyful. Love, Earl.”
The silence that followed felt different from the comfortable quiet we’d shared earlier. This was the silence of loss, of understanding that something precious had slipped away while we weren’t paying attention.
“Look at the postmark,” Dale said quietly, pointing to the envelope.
The stamp bore the logo of St. Luke’s Medical Center in Indianapolis, and the postmark was dated three weeks earlier.
“That’s the cancer center,” Wes said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I did some volunteer work there after Margaret was diagnosed. I recognize their mail processing stamp.”
We sat there in the gathering dusk, three old friends holding a letter from the fourth, and I felt something shift inside me—a recognition that the promise we’d made forty years earlier had been kept after all, just not in the way we’d expected.
Chapter 4: Finding Earl
The drive to Indianapolis took two hours, during which we called ahead to St. Luke’s Medical Center and learned what we’d already suspected but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. Earl Johnson had been a patient there for six months, fighting a battle with pancreatic cancer that he’d kept private from everyone except his medical team and the social worker assigned to his case.
The woman at the information desk was kind but firm—visiting hours were over, and since we weren’t immediate family, there were privacy regulations to consider. It was only when Wes mentioned that he’d done volunteer work at the hospital that we were directed to the social services department, where a tired-looking woman named Janet Hutchinson agreed to speak with us.
“You’re the friends he talked about,” she said after we’d introduced ourselves and explained why we were there. “The ones from the lake. He mentioned you often during our sessions.”
“How is he?” I asked, though I was afraid of the answer.
Janet’s expression told me everything I needed to know before she spoke. “I’m sorry. Mr. Johnson passed away last month. August third.”
The words hit like a physical blow. Dale sank into the chair next to me, and Wes put his hand over his eyes. I felt something cold settle in my chest, a finality that made the hospital’s fluorescent lights seem too bright and the antiseptic smell too strong.
“Was he alone?” I whispered.
“No,” Janet said gently. “His ex-wife came. The first one—Linda, I think her name was. They’d stayed in touch over the years, and she’d been helping him with medical appointments. She was with him at the end.”
“Did he…” Dale’s voice cracked. “Did he suffer?”
“He was comfortable,” Janet assured us. “We have excellent palliative care here, and he was very clear about what he wanted. He spent his last weeks telling stories about his childhood friends and a promise he’d made by a lake. He was quite proud of the fact that he’d managed to keep his part of the bargain, even if he couldn’t be there in person.”
“What do you mean?” Wes asked.
Janet smiled sadly. “He planned it all very carefully. The letter, the timing, the placement on the bench. He said it was important that you know he’d remembered, that he’d wanted to be there. He spent weeks crafting that letter, making sure it said exactly what he wanted it to say.”
She reached into a filing cabinet and pulled out a manila folder. “He left some things for you, in case you came looking for him. He was quite sure you would.”
Inside the folder were three smaller envelopes, each marked with one of our names. There was also a photograph—the four of us at the lake in the summer of 1983, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning at the camera with the absolute confidence of people who believed they had all the time in the world.
I opened my envelope with shaking hands. Inside was a short note in Earl’s careful handwriting and a small object wrapped in tissue paper.
“Karen,” the note read, “you always believed the best of people, even when they didn’t deserve it. Thank you for believing in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. This was my grandmother’s—she always said it would bring good luck to someone who needed it.”
The object was a small silver locket, tarnished with age but still beautiful. Inside was a tiny photograph of the four of us, the same image from the folder but smaller, more intimate.
Dale’s envelope contained a pocketknife—the same one he’d used to carve our initials in the bench all those years ago. “You always knew how to make things last,” Earl had written. “I thought you should have this back.”
Wes’s gift was a fishing lure, hand-crafted and painted with the same attention to detail Earl had brought to everything he cared about. “For the grandfather I know you’ve become,” the note said. “Take your grandkids fishing and tell them about the summer we caught that enormous bass that was probably really just a bluegill.”
We sat in Janet’s office reading our letters and crying without shame, three adults mourning the friend we’d lost and the reunion that would never happen the way we’d planned it.
“There’s one more thing,” Janet said eventually. “He pre-paid for his funeral and left specific instructions. He wanted it to be held at the lake where you used to meet. His ex-wife has been planning it, waiting for you to show up. She said Earl was convinced you’d come looking for him.”
Chapter 5: The Service by the Lake
Linda Patterson—formerly Linda Johnson—was a woman in her early seventies with silver hair and kind eyes that showed the strain of recent grief. She’d been sitting in her car in the hospital parking lot when we came out, having been notified by Janet that Earl’s friends had finally appeared.
“He talked about you constantly,” she said as we stood by her car, four strangers united by our connection to a man who was no longer there to introduce us. “Even during the worst days, when the treatments were making him so sick he could barely speak, he’d tell stories about the four musketeers and the adventures you had at Miller’s lake.”
“Why didn’t he tell us he was sick?” Dale asked. “We would have come. We would have been here for him.”
Linda’s smile was sad but understanding. “Because that’s not how Earl wanted to be remembered. He said he’d rather you think of him as the boy who believed in magic than the old man who was too tired to get out of bed.”
She was right, of course. Even in dying, Earl had been thinking about other people, trying to protect us from the pain of watching him fade away.
“He planned his own service,” Linda continued. “Very specific instructions. He wanted it held at sunset by the lake, with just the people who really knew him. He said the most important guests would be three people who might not even show up, but that if they did, it would prove that some promises really are forever.”
The service was held three days later, on a Thursday evening when the August heat had softened into something gentle and the light on the water had turned to gold. Linda had arranged for folding chairs to be set up on the grass near the bench, and she’d brought flowers—simple wildflowers that looked like they’d been picked from the meadow behind Miller’s farm.
There were maybe twenty people there total. Linda and her two adult children, a few neighbors from Earl’s apartment building, some co-workers from the security company where he’d worked, and the three of us. It felt right somehow—intimate and personal, the kind of gathering Earl would have appreciated.
Pastor Williams from the Methodist church where Earl had occasionally attended gave a brief service, talking about lives well-lived and promises kept and the way love transcends physical presence. But the most meaningful part came when Linda asked each of us to share a memory.
Dale told the story of the summer Earl convinced us all to build a raft and sail across the lake to explore what he was sure was a deserted island on the far shore. The raft had fallen apart halfway across, and we’d had to swim to safety, but Earl had been laughing even as he treaded water, insisting that the adventure had been worth the risk.
Wes shared his memory of the day Earl had taught him to fish, patiently showing him how to bait the hook and cast the line, never making fun of the fact that Wes was afraid of the worms and kept closing his eyes when he threw his line.
I talked about Earl’s imagination, the way he could turn an ordinary summer afternoon into an epic adventure just by believing that magic was possible. “He made us all braver than we really were,” I said. “He made us believe we could do anything.”
As the sun set behind the trees and the first stars began to appear, Linda stood up and opened a small wooden box she’d been holding throughout the service.
“Earl wanted his ashes scattered here,” she said. “He said this lake was where he’d been happiest, and he wanted to stay close to the memories.”
We stood together at the edge of the water—Linda, her children, and the three of us—and took turns sprinkling Earl’s ashes into the lake where we’d spent so many summer days. The water was calm, barely rippling, and the ashes settled on the surface for a moment before disappearing into the depths.
“He’s home,” Linda said softly, and I knew she was right.
After the service, as people began to pack up the chairs and flowers, Linda approached the three of us one more time.
“There’s something else,” she said, pulling another envelope from her purse. “Earl wrote this for all of you together. He said to give it to you after the service, when you were alone.”
We walked back to the bench—our bench—and sat down together one last time. Wes opened the envelope and read aloud in the growing darkness.
“Dear Karen, Dale, and Wes,” he began. “If you’re reading this, it means you kept the promise. All of you. You showed up, just like we said you would forty years ago. I knew you would. I never doubted it for a minute.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person, but I hope you understand why. Some things are too precious to risk with reality. I wanted you to remember me as I was when we were young and stupid and believed we could conquer the world.
“But here’s the thing—we did conquer the world, didn’t we? Maybe not in the way we thought we would when we were fifteen, but in all the ways that really matter. We loved people and were loved in return. We worked hard and tried to be decent human beings. We raised children and built lives and made the world a little bit better just by being in it.
“That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
“I know this won’t be our last meeting. Promises like ours don’t end with death—they just change form. Someday, when you’re all old and tired and ready for your own adventures to end, we’ll meet again. And this time, I’ll be waiting for you.
“Until then, be kind to each other. Stay in touch. Don’t wait forty years to see each other again. Life is shorter than we thought it was when we were kids, and the people who really know you—the ones who remember who you were before the world told you who you had to be—those people are precious beyond measure.
“Thank you for being my friends. Thank you for remembering. Thank you for keeping the promise.
“Love always, Earl
“P.S. There’s one more thing. Look under the bench.”
We looked at each other, then Dale got down on his hands and knees and felt around under the weathered wood. His hand found something, and he pulled out a small metal box that had been secured to the underside of the bench with wire.
Inside the box were four items: a photograph of us from that last day in 1983, a small notebook filled with Earl’s handwriting, and three sealed envelopes marked “To be opened in ten years.”
The notebook was filled with memories—stories about our childhood adventures, observations about each of our personalities, predictions about what our lives would be like when we were older. It was like reading Earl’s private thoughts about the friendships that had meant everything to him.
“Look at this,” Wes said, pointing to an entry dated just a few months earlier. “He wrote this while he was sick.”
The entry read: “I think about that summer every day now. Not because I’m dying, but because I finally understand what we were really promising each other by the lake. We weren’t just promising to meet again in forty years. We were promising to carry each other with us, to remember who we were when we were brave and young and believed in magic. We were promising to love each other forever, even when forever turned out to be shorter than we thought it would be.”
Chapter 6: Ten Years Later
I almost didn’t make the trip.
At seventy, my arthritis was acting up, and the drive from Fort Wayne to the lake seemed longer than it used to. Jack had been gone for fifteen years, and I’d settled into a routine of quiet days and early bedtimes that made the prospect of a sentimental journey feel more exhausting than appealing.
But Dale called the week before the anniversary, his voice carrying the same mix of determination and uncertainty I remembered from when we were kids.
“You’re coming, right?” he asked without preamble. “To open the letters?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s been a long week, and the drive…”
“Karen, it’s been ten years. Earl left those letters for a reason. We owe it to him to see what he wanted to tell us.”
“What if they’re sad? What if reading them just makes us miss him more?”
“Then we’ll miss him together,” Dale said simply. “Like we should have been doing all along.”
He was right, of course. In the ten years since Earl’s death, we’d done better at staying in touch—phone calls every few months, Christmas cards with actual handwritten notes, even a few visits when business or family brought us to each other’s towns. But we’d never talked about the letters, never planned this reunion, as if we were all afraid of what Earl might have wanted to tell us.
Wes picked me up at nine in the morning, driving the same careful way he always had, and we met Dale at the lake just after ten. The bench looked smaller than I remembered, more weathered, but our initials were still visible in the wood, and the metal box Earl had hidden was exactly where we’d left it.
“Ready?” Dale asked, holding the three envelopes.
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” I replied.
We opened them together, each reading our own letter silently before sharing what Earl had written.
Mine was the longest, several pages of Earl’s careful handwriting telling me about his struggles with depression after his divorces, about the nights when he’d sat alone in his apartment thinking about ending everything, and about how the memory of our friendship had pulled him back from the edge more times than he could count.
“You always saw the best in people,” he’d written. “Even when they couldn’t see it themselves. There were times when the only reason I didn’t give up was because I knew you’d be disappointed in me. Not angry—disappointed. And somehow that was worse than any punishment I could imagine.”
Dale’s letter was shorter but no less powerful. Earl had written about seeing Dale at my wedding all those years ago, about how proud he’d been that his friend had built such a solid life, and about his regret that they’d never talked that day.
“I was ashamed,” Earl had confessed. “My life was such a mess compared to yours, and I didn’t know how to bridge that gap. But I should have tried. You deserved better from me.”
Wes’s letter was the most surprising. Earl had written about recognizing something in Wes during those last summers by the lake, a gentleness and sensitivity that Earl had admired but never known how to express.
“You were the best of us,” Earl had written. “The kindest and most thoughtful, and I always knew you’d make something beautiful of your life. I hope you know how much your friendship meant to me, how much it shaped who I became.”
At the bottom of each letter was the same postscript: “Thank you for keeping the promise. All of it. Even the parts we never spoke out loud.”
We sat on the bench reading and rereading our letters as the morning turned to afternoon, talking about Earl and about our own lives and about the strange alchemy that turns shared experiences into lifelong bonds.
“Do you think he knew?” Wes asked as the afternoon shadows grew longer. “When he was writing these, do you think he knew we’d actually come back and read them?”
“He knew us,” Dale said simply. “Better than we knew ourselves sometimes.”
I folded my letter carefully and put it back in its envelope. “He knew we’d need this. All of us. The closure, the permission to grieve, the reminder that love doesn’t end just because life does.”
“What now?” Wes asked. “Do we wait another ten years? Twenty?”
I looked at my two oldest friends—Dale with his silver hair and kind eyes, Wes with his quiet strength and gentle smile—and realized that Earl had given us more than just letters. He’d given us a reason to stay connected, to keep showing up for each other no matter how much time passed or how much we changed.
“No more waiting,” I said. “Life’s too short, and we’re too old to waste time being polite about keeping in touch.”
“Every year,” Dale agreed. “August fifteenth. Right here.”
“Rain or shine,” Wes added.
We shook hands again, just like we had when we were fifteen, but this time the gesture carried the weight of real understanding. We weren’t promising to meet again someday when we were old and gray—we were old and gray. We weren’t dreaming about some distant future—we were living in it.
As we packed up to leave, I noticed something carved into the bench that hadn’t been there before. Fresh letters, recently cut into the weathered wood: “E.J. – Present in Spirit – August 15, 2023.”
“Who did that?” I asked.
Dale and Wes looked at each other, then at me, and I realized we’d all had the same thought but none of us had acted on it.
“Maybe it was Earl,” Wes said quietly. “Maybe that’s how promises work when you keep them long enough. They take on a life of their own.”
I liked that idea. I liked thinking that Earl’s spirit had been with us all along, that the promise we’d made as children had become something bigger than any of us could have imagined.
Epilogue: The Continuing Promise
Five years have passed since we opened Earl’s letters, and we’ve kept our word about meeting every August fifteenth. The reunions have become smaller and more precious as time goes on—last year, Dale brought his great-grandson, a towheaded seven-year-old who listened with rapt attention as we told stories about the summer we thought we saw a monster in the lake.
“Was it really a monster, Great-Grandpa?” the boy asked.
“It was to us,” Dale replied. “And sometimes that’s the only kind of real that matters.”
Wes’s health has been declining—a heart attack two winters ago that reminded us all how fragile we’ve become—but he still makes the trip from Chicago every year, driven now by one of his children who wait patiently in the car while we have our visit with the past.
My own steps are slower these days, and I use a cane more often than not, but I’ve never missed a reunion. The bench has become a pilgrimage site of sorts, not just for us but for other people who’ve heard our story and understand something about the power of keeping promises.
Sometimes we find flowers there when we arrive, left by strangers who’ve been touched by the idea that friendship can transcend time and death and the thousand small betrayals that ordinary life inflicts on our best intentions.
This year, for the first time, we brought folding chairs. The bench, while still sturdy, has become harder for our aging bodies to navigate, and we’ve accepted that some accommodations to time are necessary. But we still sit in the same order we always did—Dale on the left, me in the middle, Wes on the right, and the space where Earl should be still held sacred between us.
“Do you think we’ll make it to fifty years?” Dale asked as we watched the sunset paint the lake in shades of gold and pink.
“I hope so,” I said. “But if we don’t, that’s okay too. We kept the important promise. We showed up. We remembered.”
“Earl would be proud,” Wes said, and we all nodded because we knew it was true.
As we prepared to leave, I pulled out a small notebook I’d been carrying—similar to the one Earl had left for us, but filled with my own memories and observations about our continuing friendship.
“I’ve been writing things down,” I said. “Stories about us, about Earl, about what it means to keep a promise for forty years. I thought maybe someday, when we’re all gone, someone should know that this happened. That four kids made a promise by a lake and kept it, even when keeping it got complicated.”
“What will you do with it?” Wes asked.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe give it to one of your grandchildren, or Dale’s great-grandson. Maybe leave it with the historical society. Or maybe just tuck it under the bench next to Earl’s box, for someone to find someday who needs to know that promises matter.”
Dale smiled. “Earl would like that. He always believed in the power of stories.”
As we walked back to our cars in the gathering darkness, I thought about the strange journey that had brought us back to this place year after year. We weren’t the people we’d thought we’d become when we were fifteen—none of us had achieved the grand dreams we’d shared that last summer before adulthood changed everything.
But we’d achieved something else, something rarer and more precious: we’d learned how to love each other across time and distance and loss. We’d discovered that the most important promises aren’t the ones we make to accomplish great things, but the ones we make to show up for each other, to remember, to bear witness to the fact that our lives mattered to someone.
Next month, I’m turning seventy-five. Dale will be seventy-six in December, and Wes celebrated his seventy-fourth birthday last spring. We’re running out of summers, all of us, and we know it. But we’re not running out of love, or memory, or the strange magic that happens when people choose to honor the connections that shaped them.
Earl has been gone for fifteen years now, but he’s still with us every August fifteenth, still present in the stories we tell and the laughter we share and the way we’ve learned to hold space for loss without letting it define us.
The promise we made as children has become something larger than we ever imagined—not just a commitment to meet again, but a commitment to carry each other through time, to remember who we were when we believed in magic, and to keep believing in it even when the world tries to convince us that magic is just something we outgrow.
Some promises are meant to be broken. Others are meant to transform us in the keeping.
Ours was the second kind.
And as I write these words, sitting in my kitchen with Earl’s photograph on the table beside me and my phone ready to call Dale and Wes for our weekly check-in, I know that the promise will outlive us all. It will live on in the stories we tell, in the bench that bears our initials, and in the simple, radical idea that showing up for each other—really showing up, year after year, promise after promise—is the closest thing to forever that any of us will ever know.
The lake hasn’t changed, not really. But we have, in all the ways that matter.
And Earl would be proud.
THE END
This expanded story explores themes of enduring friendship, the weight of promises made in youth, how relationships evolve over time, and the way love transcends death. It demonstrates that some bonds formed in childhood can withstand decades of separation and change, that grief can be transformed into celebration, and that the most meaningful promises are often the ones that require us to keep showing up for each other long after the initial enthusiasm has faded. The narrative celebrates the power of memory, the importance of honoring our connections to others, and the beautiful truth that love, once given freely, never really ends.
