I thought helping my 8-year-old granddaughter, Ellie, clean out the attic would be nothing more than an afternoon of dust, forgotten decorations, old boxes, and a few embarrassing photographs from my teenage years.
I was wrong.
What began as an ordinary afternoon turned into the moment I discovered that something I had spent forty-two years believing was buried forever had never really been settled.
It started when Ellie found my old prom album.
I was kneeling on the dusty attic floor, sorting through a box of Christmas decorations, when I heard her laugh behind me.
“Grandma, look at your hair!”
I turned around.
She was holding my old prom album with both hands, grinning from ear to ear.
“Oh, give me that.”
She immediately dodged me.
“You look like your head exploded.”
I laughed despite myself.
“It was 1984. We had different standards.”
Ellie dropped down beside me and began flipping through the photographs.
There were pictures of my school friends. My parents stood stiffly beside me in one. My older brother Charlie was making a ridiculous face behind my head in another.
Then Ellie stopped turning the pages.
She stared at one photograph.
“Who’s this?”
I knew before I even looked.
David.
He was eighteen in that picture, wearing a rented black tuxedo and the nervous smile he always got whenever someone pointed a camera at him.
I was standing beside him in a pale blue dress.
“His name was David,” I said quietly.
“Was he your boyfriend?”
“My first serious boyfriend.”
Ellie smiled.
“Before Grandpa?”
“Long before Grandpa.”
She looked at the photograph again.
“You were pretty.”
“Were?”
She laughed.
David and I had been together since sophomore year.
Back then, we didn’t have much money, but we had plans.
I worked weekends at a bakery. David worked evenings at his father’s hardware store. Whenever we got paid, we’d compare what we’d managed to save.
One evening, David spread several crumpled bills across the hood of his car.
“At this rate,” he said, “we can afford the smallest apartment in America.”
