His promise had been kept.
And upstairs slept a girl who loved him enough to call him Grandpa.
Ellie is thirteen now.
She still cries about him sometimes.
So do I.
We buried Walter beside Margaret in Millbrook.
He had kept the burial plot beside hers all those years.
At his funeral, I told everyone about the strawberry shortcake bars.
About a little girl named Sarah.
About her daughter Ellie.
About an old ice cream man who looked through a truck window one evening and saw the face of a child he had loved thirty years earlier.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the chapel.
Sometimes I think about how easily none of it could have happened.
If Ellie hadn’t looked so much like me.
If Walter hadn’t driven our neighborhood.
If I hadn’t followed her outside.
If he had decided Margaret’s promise was too difficult to keep.
