True to his word, early in June Al called and arranged to pick me up after work. But I waited half an hour and he didn't come. So I walked home, to see if he'd phoned, and he hadn't so I walked back to work and waited another half hour. When I finally gave up and came home, my mother said he had rung and left a message that he’d had a flat tire. Mother left me in no doubt as to how accurate she felt his excuse was. 

I didn't believe it either. I felt it was just that he’d had second thoughts and the easier option was to stand me up. I wrote him a note to that effect.

And that was the end of the matter. No, not really the end, because once hope is rekindled it takes a lot of putting out. And he had said that he cried when he couldn't find me and he just might have really had a flat tire. So using my great talent for making opportunities, I decided that my home economics friends and I should pay a visit to the cheese factory in Hazen, which was the town where Al lived.

It was only an excuse of course, and having made the smelly tour, much to the surprise of the cheese firm, I made my way to the garage where I knew Al had worked the previous summer. He wasn't there, but his dad also so worked there, and he came over to talk to  me. "Al works on a construction site on the Dam," he said , "and he won’t be back home until 3:30, and then he's taking off again to see some girl in Bismarck."

I was so sure that I was the "girl in Bismarck" and that yet again he and I were thinking in concert, that I drove out to the site, found his car and put a note on the windshield again. This time it said, "See you at 3.30. So glad to hear you’re coming to see me tonight. Jean."

Then my friends and I went to visit another classmate another 20 miles down the road,  to kill the intervening time. When we arrived back in Hazen, right on time, Al spotted my car and came out of his house to talk to me. This time he looked both angry and mean. He was dirty and unshaven and very abrupt.

"I have a date to go to a movie with somebody else from Bismarck," he said. "You shouldn't have come here. My dad told my mother that you were here and she is very upset. I'll come to see you next Friday."

And with that he turned around and walked back in to his house, slamming the screen door. I had finally gotten the total humiliation that I'd been expecting and almost begging for. Somehow I got back into the car, and drove at very excessive speed the 50 miles home, refusing to speak to my friends in the car at all.

When I reached home, I went into my room, got all his letters, his pictures, the presents he'd given me over the years and I drove to the Bismarck Theatre, where he would be taking his date later that night, and dumped the whole lot into the trash can right outside.

But it still wasn't over because he had said he would come to see me the next Friday.

As a church organist I was much in demand for playing for weddings during the summer. That Friday I had a practice with the soloist for the wedding that was to take place the next day. So when Al called to fix a time, I arranged that he should meet me at the Cathedral. The rehearsal went pretty well. I loved playing the huge organ which I could minipulate in such a way that the whole building vibrated. And I liked the tremolo stop, which I thought made an interesting sound when I was playing softly.

I had just finished the last song and was about to shut up the organ and leave when a man entered the choir loft and introduced himself as the new choir master. He hadn't met me before since I was only in town during the summer vacations. He said my organ playing used far too much tremolo. I probably would have blushed and humbly agreed, but suddenly a voice behind us said, "Leave her alone. She has a perfect right to play it how she likes. Mind your own business."

We both were startled and when we turned to see who had spoken, there was Al. He had come in unnoticed by me while I had been playing. I was amazed as well as embarrassed. This man who had rejected me so often and hurt me so much was now defending me in a situation which was clearly none of his business and completely out of his experience. But I was pleased too, because he wouldn't have bothered if he hadn't cared for me.

We had a lovely last night. All our last nights seemed to be sad and lovely. We went out for drinks and to dance at Jerry's Supper Club. We walked hand in hand down Main Street to the pizza parlor while Al sang very loudly and quite well, Tonight, from West Side Story. Anyone who saw us would probably have taken us for lovers. I explained about ordering his college newspaper and he told me he really and truely did have a flat tire. But we agreed that we were only friends and that if I wasn't content with that relationship I would have to forget it completely.

I didn't see or hear from Al for a long time after that. But in the following December when I arrived home from college after my mother had had a stroke.  I wrote to him asking him if he still had the autobridge game we'd lent him when he was in the hospital the year before.

One afternoon when some relatives and I were visiting with my mother into the hospital room walked Al. Dare I say it - looking as handsome and wonderful as ever he had in the past. We all stared for a moment and then my Mom laughed and said “The ghost of Christmas past.”

After a short visit, he took me out for a coffee and told me that he was not continuing with his graduate school, but had just gotten a job teaching drama at the small town of Rolla. Coincidentally, my roommate at college was from Rolla. Al returned the autobridge game, and also gave me a huge bottle of Chanel 5 perfume for Christmas.

After Christmas I was keen to find out what the people of Rolla thought of him as a teacher, and when my roommate had a letter from her sister telling her that the kids thought he was kooky - a real wierdo - I was so starved for news of him that I went through her things when she wasn't there to read the letter for myself. It certainly didn't sound as if he were very popular. But since he was involved in drama, and since I had stage managed King Lear for our theatre group that year and knew all the words of the play by heart, I wrote him a parody on the play, fitting the words to his situation in Rolla. I thought it was very clever, but I didn't have a letter back.  Sharon, my roommate, knew that I had gone out with Al, so she sent her sister my picture - and somehow it got passed around his classroom and he was not at all pleased when he discovered it.

Then at Easter time when I was again home, Al called and asked if I'd like to go with him to visit his brother who was in the hospital having broken his arm. Of course, I agreed. And again, we had a pleasant time. He told me about the play that his kids in Rolla were going to be putting on by Shalom Aleikhem, and this time rather than sneaking in, I asked him if he'd mind if I came up to see it. He was very pleased with the idea. So I made my plans to travel to Rolla and to stay with my roommate and her family while I was there.

The day before I was due to leave, I had another note from him. "Hold on Matilda, here we go again," it said. 

"The play is not going to be ready to put on, but if you'd like to come anyway, I'd love to see you. But I sort of sensed when I last saw you that you were making too much of our friendship again, so if you can't accept it for what it is, don't come."

That would have been the sensible thing to do - not to go. But I had great confidence in my acting ability and I was sure I could carry off the act for a weekend, not letting him know that I still loved him as much as I ever did. So I went. 

Al met the bus and took me out to eat, and then we were joined by my roommate Sharon and her giggly sister. We bumped into many of his class while walking the streets of Rolla, and he introduced me proudly to them. The next day he had to do some school work but in the evening he again took me out to eat.

As we walked to the restaurant, Al decided to get a few things off his chest. "Ive never loved you," he said. "I have only loved three people in all my life, and you weren't one of them."

"I'll bet Shyla was one of them," I said, and he agreed, and said that Shyla and Chuck were getting married that summer. And then he told me he was thinking of getting married soon. "Is she one of the three?" I asked?

"No," he said, quite emphatically.

"Then why are you goinq to marry her?" I asked.

"It's sort of the thing that is expected," he replied. I wondered if his marrying this girl was as much to show Shyla that he could marry too, just as his dating me all those years ago was to show Shyla that he could do without her. 

We ordered our meal and started to eat but suddenly my acting was just getting too much for me and I thought I would choke. I said I wasn't feeling well and we left the restaurant and made our way back to Sharon's house. We were alone there, and I asked Al to do his play for me, being all the parts. It was Tevye’s play by Shalom Alaikhem, a version that was later made in Fiddler on the Roof I knew the play quite well. He did it and was so good and wonderful and before long I was in his arms, kissing him and wanting him so much, and his hands were exploring my body as they had never done before. 

But it was too much. My feeble ego couldn't cope with being told I had never been loved by this man who was going to marry somebody else, who then proceeded to make love to me. So I started crying. Al was annoyed and confused, and when I admitted I'd been acting and really did still love him, he got really angry. The rest of the weekend was a nightmare. Al was very cool and unforgiving. He hardly spoke to me when he picked me up from Sharon’s house on Sunday evening and walked me to the bus stop.

I wrote him a note apologizing and thanking him for the weekend when I got home, and thought that would be the end. But I did see him once more. He came to return the books I'd lent his brother Jerry when he was in the hospital and we went out for a cup of coffee. He told me that the day after my visit to Rolla, he'd been called into the Principal's office and told off for bringing his whore to school and parading her in front of the students. Apparently, when I'd been crying I managed to get lipstick smeared over his shirt, and since we'd been alone in the house, everyone put two and two together erroneously. But we laughed about it, and then he took me back to my house.

"I'll see you," he said as he was leaving.

"No," I said, “You won’t ever see me again." And as I shook his hand, deliberating avoid a last kiss, I remembered those words he had written me before. “I shook her  hand and to tore my heart asunder - and went with half my life about my ways. "With half a heart, I shut the door, but couldn’t help a last look back to see if he was looking back too, but he wasn’t.

A year later, when I’d finished my year’s dietetic internship in New York and was spending time in Bismarck before I started my first job in Chicago, I couldn't find the newspaper in our house. Eventually when it turned up, I discovered the reason for its being hidden. Al's wedding picture was in it. I wonder if he learned to love his bride in that intervening year. Feeling that some last grand gesture was required, I took the remains of the bottle of perfume he'd given me and dumped it down the toilet.

Mom realized how I was feeling but she made me smile because she said, “He really was a nice boy, and he never led you on.”

Al became professor of Drama in a small college in South Dakota. He and his wife had one son, and he is now retired. He looks a little bit like Captain Birdseye now - a big man with a full beard. I know because I checked on the internet.