Jimmy had been hit by a drunk driver on the night of July fourteenth, driving to my house with an engagement ring in his pocket. He spent three weeks in a coma at St. Joseph’s. When he woke up, he begged to see me. My mother came to the hospital once. She told him I had died in a car accident myself, and that the funeral was already over.

She had hated him for being poor and a Cole. She told each of us the lie that would keep us apart forever, and we both believed her. Wendell had found the locket in the mud below the bluff the morning after I threw it, while fishing. He saw me throw it, so he knew I was alive. He believed I had thrown his brother away, and decided Jimmy was better off grieving than heartbroken. He kept the locket, tucked the hospital wristband inside, and never had the heart to give either one to Jimmy.

Jimmy never married. The strokes came in his fifties, and last month he moved into Riverview Manor. Wendell pawned the locket while clearing out the house, angry at a girl he thought had never cared. When I told him what my mother had said to me, he sat down on the porch swing and cried. Then he drove me to see his brother that same afternoon.

Jimmy was sitting by the window in a cardigan, older and thinner, his left hand curled from the strokes. When I said his name, he turned and stared for a long time. Then he smiled the same crooked smile from the Dairy Queen. “Ruthie,” he whispered. “They told me you were gone.” I visit him every afternoon now, and he holds the locket the whole time. Some days he remembers 1982 better than today. I don’t mind. Neither of us is going anywhere.