At nineteen we promised that if we were both single at sixty we would find each other. I turned sixty on Tuesday, and the old landline rang.

PART 1 — THE CHAIR

Gil and I were best friends from seventeen.

Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Just Gil and Roz.

He went out with other girls. I went to prom with Dermot Nash, who was perfectly nice. Everybody in Belmire told us we would work it out eventually and we laughed at them, because losing it was more frightening than whatever the other thing was.

One night in the summer we were nineteen, after two spectacularly bad dates, we sat under the bleachers at the school field with a bag of chips.

"If we're both single at sixty," he said, and put his little finger out, "we stop being idiots and we find each other."

"Deal."

Two months after that he went to college three states away.

We wrote constantly and then a lot and then less.

And by the time I had worked out what I actually was about that man, Gil Hartigan was telling me about a girl in his year.

In the August of 1986 one more letter came.

He was getting married. And at the bottom he asked me not to write to him again.

I cried for about three weeks and then I did what he asked, because that is what you do.

I never married. When people ask I say I never met the right one.

That is not strictly true. I met him at seventeen and I never got round to anybody else.

Last Tuesday I turned sixty.

That night the landline went. The old one, in my mother's house, that nobody rings any more, and I nearly left it.

"Is that Roslyn?"

"Yes."

"My name's Casper. I'm Gil Hartigan's son." A pause. "My dad would like to speak to you. He hasn't got very long."

There was a rustling.

And then a voice I had not heard since 1986.

"Rozzie."

I had to sit down on the stairs.

"You remembered."

A small laugh with nothing behind it. "I remembered every birthday."

Then it went.

"Roz. I need you to know something before I go."

"What?"

"I'd already bought the ring."

I could not make a sound.

"What ring?"

"The one I was going to give you before I went. That summer."

And I said, "Then why did you marry somebody else?" — which is a question I had not let myself ask out loud in thirty-nine years.

And that man started crying down a telephone.

"That's what I've spent forty years wanting to explain."

Then, very quietly: "Come to St. Ide's. There's something here you need to see. Once you've seen it you'll understand why I stopped."

Forty minutes later I pushed that door open.

He was in the bed. Thinner than the boy, and completely, unmistakably him.

But it was not Gil that made the noise come out of me.

It was what was propped on the chair beside his bed.

PART 2 — THE WAKE

My father died in the November of 1985. I was eighteen.

He played guitar. Badly, and constantly, and he taught me on the same instrument, which was a cheap thing from 1961 with a repair on the headstock where he had dropped it in 1974 and glued it himself with the wrong glue.

You would know that headstock anywhere.

After the funeral there were about twenty-five people back at our house.

I had the guitar out because my uncle had asked me to play the one my father used to do.

And my mother came across that front room and took it out of my hands.

She did not snatch it. She took it, put it back in the case on the floor, and clicked the catches shut.

And she said, to twenty-five people:

"Give me that. It's going, Roslyn. We can't eat a guitar. Put it down, people are watching."

Nobody said one word.

My aunt looked at the carpet. My uncle, who had asked me to play, said, "Fair enough, Adele."

That instrument went to a shop on Carrow Street in the January of 1986 for ninety dollars, and I have looked for it in every second-hand shop I have been in for thirty-nine years.

PART 3 — THE SUMMER

Here is what Gil did in the summer of 1986, which I did not know until a Tuesday night at sixty years old.

He came to our house to ask my mother.

He was nineteen. He put a jacket on to do it. He had four hundred and eleven dollars saved from two summers at the cannery and a ring in his pocket from a shop in Ashmere.

And Adele Meade sat him down at our kitchen table and told him the truth about where we were.

We were losing that house. I did not know that either; I found out in the September when we moved to the flat over the chemist.

She told him I had a place on the nursing programme starting the following autumn and that I was going to give it up and go full-time at the plant.

And then she asked him — and he was very clear on the telephone that she asked, she did not tell — to give it a year.

Because if he proposed that summer, I was going to marry him instead of going, and she knew it, and so did he.

He agreed.

And then he went to Carrow Street with the ring money and bought my father's guitar back off that shop for a hundred and forty dollars, and took it to my mother, and asked her to give it to me and not say where it came from.

PART 4 — NOVEMBER

She never gave it to me.

She could not, because giving it to me meant explaining where it came from, and she had just asked a nineteen-year-old boy to disappear for a year and she was not going to have that in the house.

In the November of 1986 she wrote to him at college.

She told him I was engaged.

I was not. I have never been engaged in my life.

I do not know why she wrote it and I am never going to, because she died in 2004 and I did not ask her a single useful question in eighteen years.

Gil believed it. He was twenty and he was three states away and it came from my mother.

He married Marianne Coyle in the spring of 1987 and they had thirty-one years and two sons and she died in 2018, and he has told me, and I believe him, that he was a good husband and that he loved her.

And the letter in the August of 1986 asking me never to write again was his, and he wrote it two weeks after my mother's, and he wrote it in that order so that I would be angry with him and not go looking.

When she came to give him the guitar back, in that November, she said one sentence to him.

She wouldn't want it from you.

He has had it for thirty-nine years. It has been in the loft of a house in Ashmere in a case with the catches shut.

PART 5 — THE HEADSTOCK

Gil Hartigan died on the Sunday. Five days.

I was there for four of them.

His sons have been extraordinary to me and I did not expect that, and Casper has told me that his father told them the whole of it in the January when he got the results, because he had decided he was not going to leave them a version of it.

Marianne knew. That is the thing I keep going back to.

He told her in 1994 and she stayed and they had another twenty-four years, and Casper says she used to ask about me. Not bitterly. She called me the girl with the guitar, and she is the reason it was kept in the loft instead of sold.

I have it in my front room.

The repair on that headstock is exactly where it was and the glue has gone the colour of tea.

I have not had it restrung. I am going to, and I have been going to for four months.

Give me that. We can't eat a guitar.

My mother said that in her own front room on the day of my father's funeral, in front of twenty-five people, and clicked the catches shut.

She was not wrong. There was no money in that house and there was less of it coming.

But eight months later a nineteen-year-old boy spent every penny he had buying it back and handed it to her at the same kitchen table where she had asked him to go away for a year.