She was the one who handed me a folder one rainy Tuesday and said, “That surveyor in the corner keeps looking at you.”
His name was Neal Overton.
I married him eighteen months later.
He was a thoughtful, loving man with big, scarred hands and a laugh that filled a room, a marine surveyor who walked the hulls of freighters and yachts for a living and came home smelling of rust and cold water.
He became my closest companion.
Our mothers frequently joked that we were practically sisters.
And I genuinely believed we were.
When my first boyfriend broke my heart in tenth grade, Tracy was the person who stayed up all night with me on the bathroom floor.
When her parents separated, my family opened our home to her for six weeks, and she slept in my sister’s old bed with her sneakers by the door, as if she might have to leave at any moment.
She married a man named Vic Mayhew in her late twenties.
It ended in divorce.
When everything fell apart for her, I was there.
I helped her pack her belongings into twelve boxes and a laundry basket, and I reminded her that she didn’t have to rebuild her life alone.
She moved into a small rental on Perkins Avenue.
She drove the same dented 2011 Corolla for fourteen years.
She never complained.
Neal welcomed her into our home without hesitation.
She joined us for Thanksgivings and Christmases and ordinary Sunday afternoons.
She even had her own house key, hanging on a hook by our back door.
Sometimes Neal and Tracy sat out in his workshop on Thursday evenings for an hour or two, with the radio on, and when I brought out coffee, they would stop talking and smile too quickly.
“Taxes,” Neal would say.
“She’s helping me with the quarterly stuff.”
“I’m terrible with numbers.”
I never found it unusual.
