At nineteen, I promised to wait for him.
I waited fifty-five years, believing he was dead.
He wasn’t.
He came home, and my sister sent him away with a lie,
because she’d wanted him first and never forgave me for being chosen.
She stole fifty-five years.
She could not steal the fifty-sixth.
Because one evening he knocked on my door,
gray and wrinkled and unmistakably him,
holding the same two-dollar ring from a diner vending machine,
and the promise I made at nineteen
finally, at seventy-six, came true.
I told you I’d wait, Danny.
Nobody said I couldn’t wait fifty-five years.
And nobody, not even my own sister,
