She ended up in Tucson, married to a kind man with sad eyes who ran a spare parts yard. They had three children, and she grew old with him. She wrote me once, many years later, to explain how it had all worked out for her—how she had slowly become happy, or at least as close to it as an orphan's soul allows. She wrote that she thought I saved her, first in that alley and then with that bus ticket. The truth is,she saved me. But redemption is never a one-time thing. It demands a kind of repetition—like a prayer. And a soul must be washed free of the dust of living again and again. So we work the dirt of dreams into our hands and pray that something beneath the struggle—something true in it—will find its way down into us. Through our scars. She wrote that she still dreamed of the nights in that tiny place with a broken window, and a young man filled with stains and the murmur in his heart. She said she loved him in the way a woman does when she knows it’ll never be spoken of...
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