"Half a heart."(Kevin Hughes) She was only fifteen years old when she gave him her heart. Well…half a heart anyway. A tiny gold heart with a single diamond that he used to joke about.

“You can see the diamond…right there (pointing with the tip of his little finger). You have to be on the equator, with no clouds, at high noon on the Summer Solstice to see it …but it is there.”

She would laugh, because she knew that heart meant more to him than any diamond. He never took it off. Not even to shower. He kept it on, even long after she gave him back the identical twin of that heart.

She put a ring on. A big ring. One that you didn’t need the equator, or the Summer Solstice to see. If he had seen it on her…well, she smiled at what he would have said:

“Elvis give you that ring?”

She thought that was a strange thought. Especially since the man that slid that ring on her finger would soon be her husband.

Life moved on and she forgot about such silly thoughts. The kids came. Grew up. Then left. Her husband, she lost long ago to work and familiarity. She took care of him in his last years. There was no love left. Just duty. She didn’t even list her name on the Obituary…instead saying he would be missed by friends and family. Most of the few notes came from Business Associates …he had no friends.

Mostly she felt free. Some pangs of guilt because she didn’t feel grief. She finally got her life back. So she lived it.

The knock on her door was unexpected.

“Yes?”

It was a UPS driver. A nice young girl, too bad she spoiled her arms with all those tattoos. And the nose ring had to be against Policy. But she was too polite to say anything about either.

“Are you Mrs. Flowers?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, sign here. Just use the wand.”

She did just that.

“What is it?”

The UPS driver shrugged her shoulders.

“Don’t know. I just deliver stuff.”

She took the small package into her living room. It was very small. Like an old jewelry box that you might get a locket in, or a bracelet. She opened it up. Inside was a smaller velvet covered box. Purple. Her favorite color. She felt the hair on her neck rise up. Goose-pimples pushed their way through the old (but still fair) skin of her arms. She had a premonition that couldn’t be possible. Out loud she said:

“It can’t be.”

She opened the box. Tears sprung from her eyes. Years were torn from her memory exposing the day, some fifty five years in her past, when she gave that same box, with half her heart in it, to him. It was a long time until her eyes let enough memories shed for her to see clearly again. She pulled the gold chain out, and lifted the half a heart medallion nestled in the middle of the velvet seat.

When she pulled the medallion out, the bottom of the little box was exposed. She saw a neatly folded piece of paper. She lifted it out of the box. On it were two short sentences…and a phone number.

She read them both out loud:

“Any chance you would wear this again? I still have mine.”

The phone number..well... she had memorized that years ago. She smiled as she put the necklace around her neck. She got her phone off of the table and started tapping numbers. He answered on the first ring. She said the words that made her heart whole, and his full:

“It must be Summer on the Equator, because I can see the diamond clearly when I look down on it.”

His laugh was that of someone with a whole heart.

---