I knew her as Tori.
Without saying a word, he came and carefully put in my hands an old white rose boutonnière.
Then he looked up at me and whispered, “It must be with you.”
Before I could ask him what he was talking about, he jumped back in line at lunch.
The boutonnière matched perfectly with my bouquet.
The ground seemed to move under my feet.
A moment earlier I was serving mashed potatoes. The next moment, I was sitting on the floor of the cafeteria while forty years of certainties crumbled in my hands.
The school nurse insisted she lie down.
I refused.
“I’ve waited forty years,” I said; my voice hardly looked like mine. I can hold up one more hour.
Twenty minutes later, lunch time ended and the cafeteria emptied.
There were only two people left.
Me.
And a woman who remained silent at the door. He must not have been much more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old.
