Page 63 of Key West Homecoming

Emma smiled.

“Would you like to ask me questions,” he asked, “or would you rather I talk?”

Emma didn’t have to think about it.

“How did you meet her?”

Edmund smiled again.

“I was hoping you’d ask me that.”

He turned the book on the table slightly before picking up his coffee.

“We lived in the same building in Miami. The mailboxes were in the lobby, a wall of small brass doors that should have been replaced twenty years before either of us got there. I picked up my mail every afternoon at four-thirty. Your grandmother picked hers up at four-fifteen.”

Emma smiled.

“For two years, we lived in the same building and missed each other by fifteen minutes every day. I always liked that part of the story. Two years and fifteen minutes.”

“What changed?”

“A package.”

Emma laughed softly.

“I was expecting one, so I went downstairs early. Gloria was standing at her mailbox fighting with the key. The locks were terrible. I’d learned that if you lifted the key slightly while you turned it, the lock would open.”

“So you rescued her mail.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I asked if I could try. She stepped aside, I opened the box and handed her the mail. She thanked me and told me her name. I told her mine.”

Edmund paused, and Emma waited.

“She asked if I had time for a cup of coffee upstairs.”

“And you did.”

He smiled, “I did. As it turned out, I had time for coffee upstairs for the next eight and a half years.”

Emma loved that and smiled.

“That was really it?”

“That was it. It was a Tuesday in September. Gloria had been widowed for six years, and I’d lost my wife eleven months earlier. Neither of us was looking for anyone, which may have been why it worked as well as it did.”

He looked toward the garden.

“It was the most surprising thing that ever happened to me, and I spent forty years teaching Classics. I made a career out of people doing surprising things.”

Emma laughed, and Edmund seemed pleased that she had.

“She was a wonderful woman,” he said. “I’m sure you know that.”

“I do.”

“Funny, too. Much funnier than people realized at first.”

Emma nodded. “She was.”