The thing I want to tell her… the thing I want to tell you, Martha, is that you will never fade for me. In the beginning of this book, I mentioned getting older, how the word forty looks spindly and weird. Getting older scares me, too, but I would not trade it for getting younger. Time moves in peculiar ways. Fast and slow at the same time. When I look at you, I don’t see whatever imperfections you see. Our faces are just geography. They tell us the story of who we are and who we used to be. I see you as I have always known you: I see you at twenty-five and thirty and now forty-two. I see you as a little girl camping with your brother and sister, a purple bandanna tied around your head, looking so much like Ruthie does now. I love the story your face tells me because I love you.

That is the real gift of marriage, I think. When people talk about “growing old together,” what they are really talking about is the desire to see somebody all the way through, to connect your life with somebody in such a deep way that the word old loses whatever scary power it might have had on us alone. Yes, we change. Of course we change. I am no longer the six-year-old on the Big Wheel, the nine-year-old receiving his first kiss, the fifteen-year-old getting his ass kicked in high school. Those are just stories I carry around like old seashells. Nobody cares about old seashells, but you put them in a big glass and once in a while maybe you run your fingers through them and feel their surfaces. We keep them safe and add to our collection, one by one, over the years, and maybe the kids take some of them along when they start their own families, and in the end, I think that’s enough.