The Sneakers That Brought Him Home
Forgiveness
I will tell you honestly that Bruce and I did not resolve six years of silence in one morning in a principal’s office, and I would not trust this story if it told you we did. What we did was agree, standing in that parking lot afterward with our children a few feet away comparing notes on their homeroom teacher like none of the rest of it had happened, to sit down properly, just the two of us, and finally say the things that should have been said years earlier.
We met two days later at the Wagon Wheel Diner, in my own section, on my own night off, at the same corner booth Bruce and my husband used to take every Friday after their shift at the equipment yard, back when the three of us were young enough to believe our lives had already been figured out.
I told him what those six years had cost me, not to punish him further but because he deserved the truth as much as I had deserved his. I told him about the anger I had carried, the nights I had lain awake convinced our whole friendship had been a lie, the way his silence had made an already unbearable grief feel like a second abandonment stacked directly on top of the first.
He let me say every bit of it without once trying to defend himself, and when I was finished, he told me again, in plainer words than he had managed in the principal’s office, exactly why he had gone and exactly what those two years of drinking had done to him before the two years of getting sober had done their slower, harder work of building him back.
Our pastor, a soft spoken man everyone in town simply calls Pastor Lund, sat with the two of us the following Sunday after service, in the same little white church I had spent four years driving past without looking at, and he told us something I have carried with me since. He said that grief and guilt like to wear the same coat, and it takes most people years to tell them apart, and that forgiveness is rarely a single moment, no matter how the moment in that office had felt. It is a decision you keep making, he said, over and over, on the ordinary days as much as the extraordinary ones.
I decided, sitting in that pew with my daughter on one side of me and, for the first time in six years, my husband’s best friend on the other, that I was ready to keep making that decision.