“She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle
into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior
composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told
her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she
sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him
since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and
now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those
years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put
them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve
endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the
dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says
is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a
thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve
your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your
grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to
you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark
the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on,
it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those
wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back
of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some
kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long
deferred.”
