“I guess something did come up back then,” Eric grinned wryly. “I don’t think any of us even came close to realizing it at the time, but it was probably the most important evening of my life.”

“Not all the pieces fell into place that night,” Eunice said, enjoying the memory of that long-ago reunion as much as Eric did. “It took years, but you’re right in that it was the foundation for a lot of things, and none of us saw them coming at the time.”

“How could we? I didn’t have any real plans then, at least other than going out to California in the spring and spending the summer climbing with Chip. After that plans were pretty fuzzy. I would have to say that to the extent I’d thought about it at all, I figured I’d wind up in California after that summer, but I’m quite sure I’d never thought it out that far.”

“You’ve never been one to think things out any further than you have to,” she charged.

“That’s true, I guess, at least as far as specific plans go,” he admitted. “At that time in my life I didn’t have plans to be what we might as well call a lifelong outdoor bum. I think then my plans consisted of doing outdoor stuff for a few years, and then settling down with some woman and doing the job-and-family thing. In fact, I’d have to say that those were my plans on the distant horizon for a good many years after that, but I was enjoying my life as it was and wasn’t ready to change it anytime soon. The big thing you and Jeff did was to make it possible for me to live the kind of life I wanted in those years, and I don’t think my doing it put you out very much.”

“Not really,” she replied. “Oh, we won’t talk about a few thousand dinners over the years, but you were doing a lot for us back then, at least when you were here. It wasn’t as if you were mooching off of us, because you weren’t. We were just happy to have you around when you could be here. If nothing else, Jeff often commented that it was worth the trouble because it gave him a competent seasonal driver he could depend on, at least most years. Yes, you missed a few winters, but there were good reasons for them and he never faulted you for the missed years. When you knew you were unlikely to be around the following winter, you always gave plenty of warning. The seasonal drivers were always a trouble spot for Jeff as long as he was in the business. At least he knew that when you promised to be there, you’d be there.”

“Keeping promises has always been important to me,” he said. “That’s why I’ve always been careful about agreeing to them, and I’ve not made any I didn’t think I could keep. I know it’s made things uncomfortable at times, but that’s the way I am.”

“I’ve known that for many years, and I think it’s one of the admirable things about you. After Jeff had his stroke you promised that you’d be here for him, and you were. I knew I could depend on you to do just exactly what you said. I appreciated it and I know Jeff appreciated it.”

“He was my friend, and after the stroke I made a promise to him to take care of him, and that’s that.”

“I know that,” she said. “But I’ve often wondered why you are the way you are about keeping promises.”

Eric was silent for a minute or more before he spoke again. “That’s a little hard for me to explain,” he said finally in a very sad voice. “Eunice, I’ve never told anyone this before, not even Jeff, but, uh, that goes back to my father again. I was just a little tyke the last time I saw him. I’m not sure now, but I must have been five when I last saw him, or maybe not that old. I remember crying because I didn’t want him to go, but he made me a promise that he’d come back.” Eric was silent for another moment, and had to force the next words out. “He never did, Eunice. He never came back. He broke his promise. I’m sure he didn’t want to, but the end result was the same. It must have been about the time that I realized that he really wasn’t going to keep his promise and come back that I made up my mind to never make a promise I didn’t feel pretty damn sure I could keep.”

“I think I understand,” she said gently.

“When we got word that he’d been killed,” Eric went on, “Mom promised that she’d be there for me. Well, it turned out she broke that promise, too. There probably wasn’t a hell of a lot she could have done about it, but the bottom line is the same. It just drove home to me to be goddamn careful about making promises.

“What that’s meant for me is that I’ve been pretty strong about keeping promises all my life,” he went on, not quite as sad now. “I can look back now and see that it’s screwed up a lot of things in my life. Maybe it’s part of the reason I never even got close to getting married. It would involve a long-term promise that I might not be able to keep. Things have to be pretty damn important to me to want to make a promise in the first place, and then they have to be short-term enough that I can be pretty sure I can keep it, like taking care of Jeff. Eunice, I’d have had to die to not keep that promise I made to him, and I would have died unhappy since I’d have broken my promise.”

Eunice looked over at her long-time friend with an understanding she’d never had about him in more than half a century, and it provided a lot of answers to a lot of questions she’d always had about him. Those feelings of his had to really be deep-seated, and she’d remembered enough of his stories about his very troublesome childhood to know that he must have really resented promises to him being broken. His keeping promises may have been an admirable character trait, but from knowing him as long as she had, she could see how it was an uncomfortable one, too.

Yes, it had shaped his life in many ways. For many years she’d thought back to those days in college, when Donna seemed to have set her heart on him, and had been frustrated because she could never seem to pin him down. Eunice had always understood it to be that Eric preferred to be carefree and unattached so he could pursue his adventures and his footloose life, but now she realized that there was something far deeper going on. Donna had never stood a chance with him, not that it mattered for anything now. He couldn’t make himself promise her what she wanted to be promised; it was that simple.

It all wanted some thinking about, but this wasn’t the time. “I don’t think I ever realized that,” she said finally. “It makes a number of things about you make sense that I never really understood before.”

“Actually, it took me a long time to figure it out myself,” he admitted. “It was just something about the way it was, and the why didn’t really matter. I could make short-term promises easily enough, like when I promised Jeff to stay here through the worst of that first heating season. That was a job I never expected to have in my life, and it amazes me that I’ve been doing it all these years.”

Winter 1961–1962

The morning after Eric’s return and his agreement to work for Jeff for the winter, the two of them took off in the Rambler for Harrington Oil’s Amherst office, which was located out on the edge of town. It consisted of a small office building a somewhat larger garage, and a number of oil tanks located next to a railroad siding. Jeff led Eric inside and introduced him to Agnes, his secretary and all-around helper. “Agnes, this is Eric Snow,” Jeff said by way of introduction. “I’m going to give him a tryout as a delivery driver. I’ll need all the paperwork completed. When you get that done, I’ll take him out back and show him the ropes.”

“Good,” the older woman replied. “I had a couple possible ideas for drivers, but it’s good to know you turned one up.”

“Eric is an old friend,” Jeff explained. “He just got out of the Army. I think he’ll do just fine once he learns his way around. I figure on riding with him for a couple days, and then maybe if we pull even with the deliveries a little I’ll have him go with another one of the drivers for a while before we turn him loose.”

Jeff spent the rest of the day teaching Eric how to do the job – filling the truck, making deliveries, and the paperwork. The work wasn’t hard, although dragging the delivery hose could get to be a problem over long distances. “There really isn’t a whole lot to it that’s very complicated,” Jeff explained. “Sometimes the trick is just to find where to fill the customer’s tank in the first place. If they have a tank in a basement or something like that, it can be hard to find the fill spout. If it’s complicated, sometimes we have to resort to a cheat sheet. Agnes will keep an eye on the deliveries you have to make, and if anything complicated comes up she’ll know about it and warn you. And, while most people will want to be filled pretty full, you don’t want to overflow the tank, so you have to pay attention to what you’re doing.”

Eric learned quickly. By the end of the week Jeff felt that he was ready to make deliveries on his own, and by then Eric had been to the Secretary of State’s office in Hawthorne and had a chauffeur’s license, so he was ready in that regard, too.

It was too dark in the evenings to work on the guest cottage much, but Jeff went out and got the space heater working so the place could warm up a little. It wasn’t too bad when the three of them went out there on Saturday morning to get started working on the place.

There was a lot of stuff that had been just left in the cottage over the years, things that apparently Chambers had no particular use for, but were too good to throw away. As they’d noted earlier, much of it consisted of old magazines, years’ worth of Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Life, True, Argosy, Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. “You know what?” Eric said after a moment’s thought. “Let’s not throw these away.”

“It’s an awful mess,” Jeff protested.

“Yeah, but I’m going to be spending a lot of evenings here by myself, and I’ll bet there’s a lot of good reading here. Some of the current events stuff will be way out of date, but there still should be a lot of interesting stories. That’ll eat up some time. Let’s just sort them out and get them in order so if I find a multi-part serial I’ll have an idea where the next part is.”

“Well, I guess if that’s what you want,” Eunice said. “We still need to get this place cleaned up, though. I’ll bet no one has gone through this place with a vacuum cleaner or soap and water since that kid used it as a playhouse.”

It took them most of the day to get it cleaned up to Eunice’s satisfaction; the guys, naturally, weren’t quite as picky. Eric stayed in the place for the first time that evening, although there was still some moving in that needed to be done. Some things like sheets and towels for the guest cottage came from the attic of the house, and everyone suspected that at least some of them must have been in the guys’ apartment at Meriwether College years before. They had to get the things of Eric’s that had been stored in the attic of Jeff’s parents’ house and move them to the guest cottage; quite a bit of it found its way to the attic of the lake house. Jeff and Eric had to stop at the grocery store in Amherst to stock him up on food and other supplies.

In a week or so Eric was thoroughly settled into the guest cottage. He said he found it comfortable and there was no reason to doubt him. A little to everyone’s surprise, he spent a lot of time there by himself, and only came over to the main house for dinner now and then, on invitation. He was doing well on the job, and was proving to be a careful and competent delivery driver. He rode to and from Amherst with Jeff every day, of course, and after a month things seemed to be working out very well.

Soon the holidays were on them. Jeff and Eunice planned to spend Thanksgiving with her parents and Eric was invited to join them, since her parents knew that Eric had been a long-time friend. They had a good time, but were back home before dark; Eric retreated to the guest cottage, where he said he was part-way through a multi-part series in some old Saturday Evening Posts. With that out of the way, thoughts turned to Christmas and the preparations needed; Eunice had a long list of people to send Christmas cards to. She had some mental debate over whether to send a card to Donna at all; there had been no word from her since the time she and Frank had showed up the previous summer. In the end, she decided to send one, and included a brief note to say that Eric was back and working for Jeff for the winter – nothing more than that.

They never received a card from Donna, and somehow that wasn’t surprising. “Well, I guess that says about what it has to,” Jeff commented when she mentioned the lack of response to him. “I sure hope she’s happier than I think she is.” After a brief discussion, they decided to not say anything to Eric about it, either way.

By that time Eric had exchanged a couple of letters with Chip out in California. It turned out that Chip was living with his parents, as expected, and had a job pumping gas in a gas station. It wasn’t a great job in terms of money, but he got a lot of hours in and was building up cash toward their planned summer climbing campaign. The exact date of their getting together would have to depend on the heating season in Michigan, but it didn’t have to be pinned down very closely in any event.

While Eunice’s pregnancy hadn’t been showing very much when Eric came to live in the guest cottage, by the end of the year it was pretty clear she was going to be having a baby in the near future. She was still working at the bank, but it was already known there that she wasn’t going to be staying there much longer, and she wouldn’t be coming back to work after the baby was born. She wanted to spend the time taking care of the child, and since she and Jeff could afford it, there was no reason not to.

As the year came to an end, both Jeff and Eunice were satisfied with the way things had worked out for them. They were where they wanted to be, doing what they wanted to, and they had little reason to complain. It would have been nice, they conceded, if they knew that Donna was happier than they had reason to think she was, and if Eric had a little more stability in his life, but they knew that he was doing what he wanted to do, too. All in all they were happy, and they really couldn’t ask for much more.

December, January, and February were the busiest months for Harrington Oil. Eric was kept busy delivering heating oil full time, even overtime; when things got too bad, even Jeff had to fire up the oldest and most decrepit truck to help them keep up with orders.

By the end of February Eunice was getting very large with the baby. At odd times over the past weeks Jeff and Eric had redecorated the second bedroom in the house, getting it ready for the new occupant. Jeff was glad of the help; he could handle things like tools and paint brushes, but he was hardly any master with them.

As February drew to a close and Eunice’s due date grew near, a small problem arose. The old Volkswagen bug she’d been driving for some time was still a sound car, but the heater left a lot to be desired. Even though she didn’t expect to have to do much driving after the baby arrived, it would be preferable if she had a little newer, more comfortable car. At the same time, Eric had come to the conclusion that it would be a good idea for him to have a car. It wasn’t so much for the job, since he could ride with Jeff, but to get out to California and get around the various places he and Chip planned to go climbing. Of course, a reliable cheap car with good gas mileage seemed to be the right choice.

It didn’t take a great deal of planning. Eunice’s father still had his small collection of cars for sale next to his Sinclair station, but nothing there seemed to serve the purpose. However, after some discussion a three-cornered deal was worked out, where Eric would buy the VW, and the money from that could be applied to a down payment on a year-old Rambler American from the car lot in Hawthorne. It was well within Jeff and Eunice’s budget, and the newer car could be expected to give good service for a long time. Of course, Eric had Eunice’s father go through the VW to make sure everything was sound, and it was. Eric wrote to Chip to tell him the car problem was solved, although he still wasn’t sure when he’d be getting to California.

The deal was completed just in time. On March fifteenth Eunice’s water broke in the night; she and Jeff gathered up her things and were off to the hospital in Hawthorne. Eric drove the VW to work, told Agnes that the baby was on the way and to not expect to see Jeff for a day or two. Then he went out and got started on his list of deliveries for the day. When he got back to the office late that afternoon, Agnes told him that Jeff and Eunice had had a little girl, who they’d decided to name Ann.

Having a baby around the house changed things a lot for Jeff and Eunice, maybe more than they’d expected. It was probably just as well that she’d given up her job at the bank a few weeks before, because taking care of Ann proved to be more work than either of them anticipated. Still, having Ann was what they had wanted, and they were very happy with her.

In a couple days Jeff was back at work, trying to catch up on things. As the rest of the month went by, and then on into April, orders for heating oil refills began to drop, just as they always did around that time of year. On the way home one day in the second week of April, Jeff told Eric, “If you’re still anxious to get on out to California, you might as well think about leaving. I could maybe keep you on for another week if I had to, but it won’t be any longer than that.”

“I have to admit,” Eric replied, “since the weather has been warming up, I’ve been more than ready. How about we do it Friday? I’ll need to spend a couple days packing up my stuff in the guest cottage, put what I’m not going to need in your attic, and load the VW for the summer. In fact, I’ve already started doing it. I ought to be out of here by the first of the week.”

“I figured something like that,” Jeff smiled. “I’ve been seeing it coming. I know you haven’t managed to work your way through all of those old magazines. Do you just want to throw out the rest?”

“Not yet. I don’t know if I’m going to be back another winter, but I suppose I could be. How about if I just load them into your attic too, at least until we find out?”

“Might as well, if you want to do the hauling. Look, that’s something we need to talk about. Eric, you’ve done a fine job for us this winter, and I’ve had several compliments about your service and how friendly you are to customers. If you want to come back next fall, I’ll be glad to have you, and you won’t be on the bottom of the seniority list. I’ve had a hell of a time keeping drivers this winter, and I wouldn’t be surprised to lose one or two more when heating season rolls around next fall.”

“You know me, I don’t like to make promises I’m not sure I can keep,” Eric replied. “I don’t know what’s going to happen this summer. Chip and I could blow through the climbing we want to do in a couple months, although I really doubt it. If we wind up going all summer, then things ought to be winding up along in October. About all I can do is let you know as we get closer to then.”

“I guess I can’t ask for anything more, but do keep in touch. In fact, I plan on giving you some pre-addressed stamped post cards so you won’t have that as an excuse not to keep us up on what’s happening. I realize we probably won’t be able to get in touch with you, but that’s no reason you can’t keep in touch with us.”

“I know I could have done better writing,” Eric shrugged. “But well, I had my reasons, especially last summer.”

“I realize that, but try to do a little better. I mean, consider it in lieu of rent or something, OK?”

“I’ll try,” he shook his head. “Jeff, I really need to do something nice for you and Eunice. You’ve been very kind to me this winter. You didn’t have to do half of the things you did for me, and letting me stay in the guest cottage for the winter was especially a bonus. I wouldn’t be anywhere near as ready to go climbing this summer if you hadn’t come through for me there.”

“We did it because you’re a friend,” Jeff told him. “You’re my best friend and I think I owe you for a lot of things. If it turns out you don’t come back next winter, at least stay in touch with us. I know I’m not interested in doing the kind of things you like to do but there’s a satisfaction that goes with helping you do them and then hearing about them afterwards.”

“Oh, I’ll be back sooner or later. When you get right down to it, you’re my best friend, too. It really bothered me that we couldn’t be closer while I was in the Army, but maybe we can do better in the future.”

That weekend was spent packing up Eric’s things, not that he had a lot – he was one of those people who didn’t like to accumulate a lot in his life. Soon his summer clothing and outdoor gear were loaded in the VW, and the rest of his things were in the attic, along with the remaining old magazines. The guest cottage was clean, and there was virtually no sign that he’d spent the winter living there.

Early Monday morning he had breakfast with Jeff and Eunice as usual, then he went out to the VW, gave them a little wave, and was on his way to new adventures. “I sure hope he has a good time,” Jeff said to Eunice as they watched him drive away.

“I’ll bet he does,” Jeff replied. “He’s that kind of person.”

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