At seventy-five, I thought fate had returned the first love my parents had taken from me nearly sixty years earlier. But the day after I buried him, his daughter placed a wooden box in my hands and said, “I tried to protect you, but you still walked RIGHT INTO HIS TRAP.”
Calder Wynn was seventeen when he first kissed me beneath my parents’ back porch.
I was sixteen, wearing a pale blue dress my mother had sewn, and he smelled faintly of engine oil because he had spent the afternoon helping his uncle repair a truck. He apologized for his dirty hands before touching my face.
I thought that was the kindest thing any boy had ever done.