It was a quarter to five. The light was thin, the way it gets the day after the clocks change, when your body expects another hour of afternoon and the sky has already turned the page. She was on the porch in her plum coat, half in and half out of it, with her keys in one hand, about to go to the mailbox. She looked up and saw the truck, and saw me, and did not move.
I did not phone ahead. I will answer for that. I knew that if I phoned, she would say, come Wednesday, and Wednesday I would lose my nerve.
I came up the walk with the tissue held against my chest. It had slipped open at one corner, and I watched her eyes go to it and stay there. I saw her see the red.
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I saw her know. It happened in the length of a breath. All the color went out of her face, the way it went in the hall at the lockers in 1970, and then something came back into it that I had not seen in fifty-six years, the girl on the ice, plain and furious and astonished, and for a moment I thought she was going to run.
She did not run. She put her hand on the porch rail. She stood there.
At the foot of her steps I stopped. “Marvene,” I said, and my voice was not steady, and I did not try to make it so. “I am not here to ask you for anything.”
She said nothing.
“I have had this since the seventeenth of January, 1970,” I said. “I think it is time you had it back. It was still around my wrist when Mr. Lorentz lifted me out. My mother washed it and mended it, and it has been in her chest and then mine for fifty-six years. I knew it was you by the Monday after. I saw your hands in typing class. I never said, because you asked me not to, and then because I was a coward, and then because I was in love with you and wanted you to love me for something besides that.”
Her mouth moved. “Stan.”
“I owe you my life,” I said. “I have owed you my life since I was sixteen years old, and I have been carrying it up and down the state of Nebraska ever since, and I would like to give you back your scarf and say thank you. That’s all. That’s the whole of it. And whatever you do with it, it’s yours.”
The porch light came on over her head by itself, the way they do now, on a sensor, when the days get short.
I climbed the eight steps. I took the tissue paper in both hands, the way you hold a thing that has been in a house a long time, and I laid the scarf across her open palms. It smelled of cedar. At the one end, where the barbed wire had once caught it, my mother’s darker mend showed, and Marvene’s thumb went to it and stopped.