‘ god, we’re so lucky to have each other. ’
He doesn't remember how he got here.
Pike’s distant bark is enough to startle him. A quiver of the shoulders and a whine of the cool evening wood against his back soon to follow, as he quietly presses himself further away from the scene before him. All summer-dry grass bathed in dusty golden hour light. The edges of his vision have begun to blur, squinting eyes made straw-yellow by the blooming cataracts. He blinks once. Twice. Three times. Trying to gain both focus and understanding, sore attempts to identify the last few hazy silhouettes as they file into their homes.
... Home. He wants to go home.
Wrinkled hands grip the sea-damp edge of the porch swing, at the ready for the push-off and up onto his boot-clad feet, until he feels something. Someone. Wrapping thin, sun-spotted arms around the crook of his elbow. Calm washes over him like the low and lazy tide, the fog bank of his mind lifts, and clarity takes hold as the sweetest voice he’s ever heard, the voice he knows better than any other, breaks through the murk as easy as high-noon sun.
‘ God we’re lucky to have each other. ’ Mildred always had a knack, a gift, for giving his own thoughts life, as if she could somehow read his mind. Yet another testament to just how well-matched they are. And he could sit and lament about their lost ability to truly explore it. He could. But with the way she’s looking at him now --- all pretty brown eyes shining up at him through her coke bottle glasses, all beaming smile that scrunches up her crow’s feet and laugh lines --- he can’t find the audacity in himself to wallow. There is so much beauty to be found in her antiquity, and John still looks at her as though she’s the single most radiant thing he’s ever laid his eyes on, because she is. Every little age spot and wrinkle and patch of soft loose skin a memory of a life well-lived. As a mother of his child, as his soulmate, as his very best friend. A life he could not be fully present for, no, but a life he was hardly absent for, either. Their entanglement lied somewhere in the between, an abundance of love and passion packed into modicums of time they could steal. And though his heart will always ache for more, for now, he decides to be grateful that their worlds collided at all. A life without Millie Gunning? He’s certain it would hardly be a life worth living.
“ We are... ” His lips pressed to her forehead, he speaks against her powdery skin, his voice scuffed by age but the reverb strong as ever. “ I thank God for leading me here every day. Leading me to you. ” Words are soon sealed with a chaste kiss at her brow. Golden hour turns to blue, their neighbors far too tired and content in their den chairs to pay the island’s eldest any true mind. What trouble can two eighty-somethings cause, anyway? Benefit of the doubt works in their favor, allows John to rest his chin atop her thinning white hair. They are left unnoticed, unbothered, as she scolds him for needing a shave and makes him laugh the hardest he has all week. Saccharine and belly-deep. Some things never change.
Something is happening to them. This he knows to be true. Millie brushes off her requests for walks to her house as time to catch up. And while he doesn’t doubt this, he can tell that she’s beginning to forget. Names of neighbors, faces of friends, where she lives. There’s a subtle fear in her eyes whenever she asks, a fear he is intimate with. He feels it too. He’s heard Warren and Ooker muttering behind his back in the sacristy, worried chatters of how he’s been stuck in loops of consecrations and gospel re-readings. How he keeps losing track of a ritual that should come as second nature. Forgetful he is, deaf he is not.
But as long as he knows where Millie’s house is, he solemnly vows that he’ll be the dutiful shepherd and keep leading her back. Keep spending summer afternoons out on the porch with her. Keep braiding her hair, or clasping her necklace, or opening her jars when the island cold aggravates the ache in her wrists. And he’ll happily keep holding her in his arms, so that they both might get through these days a little more calmly, a little less afraid.
He doesn’t remember how he got here, but clearly, he is home.
