Helen dipped her fork slowly into the tip of the piece of pie, and slid it down through the toasted coconut, the light and airy whipped cream, the smooth custard, and finally the flaky bottom crust. The first bite was always the best and she didn't want to rush it.

She brought the fork to her lips slowly, and let out a contented sigh as the flavors combined in her mouth.

Helen was a practical woman, but on Wednesdays, with her slice of pie, she allowed herself to dream.

Jeremy. Jeremy Rodriguez.

She always thought of him as the one that got away. Bert used to laugh whenever she said that. And add in a grumpy voice, the one that got away with our money, you mean.

And then she would feel compelled to remind Bert that it was her money, not his, that she'd given to Jeremy, and he'd just grunt and ask her what was for dinner.

"How is everything?" The waitress stopped by her table, a young girl with short red hair and bright blue highlights. She had a piercing in her cheek and on one eyebrow that Helen thought looked painful, but didn't ask because she imagined the girl rolling her eyes if she did. Instead, Helen smiled and told her the pie was excellent as usual.

The girl - Macy - smiled. "Cool," she said, and refilled Helen's coffee cup.

The diner had changed hands three or four times over the years. But the pie was always the same. It was something you could count on, and that mattered.

Back when she first started coming here she'd saved up her money for the weekly treat, sometimes searching for quarters in the couch cushions. Back then she'd worked part time at the library, and Wednesdays were her day off. Everyone always said that with her knowledge of books and her organizational skills she could have gone farther, maybe even been the Director, if she'd only had a college degree. But she hadn't, and so that was that.

Of course now, years later, Helen could have afforded to have pie more than once a week. But keeping up the ritual made it something to look forward to. After all, Helen told herself as she sat sipping her coffee and lingering over the remaining bits of pie on her plate, if it was Christmas every day then pretty soon Christmas wouldn't be anything special, now would it?

Macy looked over from behind the counter and smiled, and Helen realized she'd spoken the thought out loud.

"Thinking about Christmas already?" Macy asked. "It's only April."

"Never too soon to start planning," Helen said with a laugh. My God, she hoped she wasn't going senile. She imagined herself walking down Cottman Avenue, mumbling out loud, while people going on with their lives crossed the street to stay out of her way. Like crazy old Mrs. Montgomery, who had owned the row house across from her all those years ago, and used to sit on the small front stoop and carry on a conversation with her dead husband, while she peered out over the lawn to make sure none of the neighborhood kids trampled her flowers.

"Well I won't be chatting away with you, Bert, while I walk down the street," Helen muttered, then laughed at herself, because it wasn't much different talking to him while she sat in the diner.

Helen scooped up the last morsel of pie crust with her fork, then paid the check, counting out exactly twenty percent for the tip, then adding just a little bit more. She liked the idea of a little bit more. She always had.

It wasn't a long walk back home, but still Helen felt good about herself, that she could pace it off just as briskly as she'd done decades ago.

When she got home, she sat at the small drop-leaf table to sort her mail, in the kitchen that hadn't changed much since she and Bert bought the Philadelphia row house in 1969. The Vietnam Era version of the GI Bill had catapulted them out of the low income neighborhoods they'd both grown up in, and dumped them squarely into the middle class.

Back then most of their neighbors had been just like them. Young couples, many who had the veteran loan program to thank for their ability to afford a house at all. And in those early years she'd watched the neighborhood fill with children. When the months and then years went past with no babies to fill her own home, she'd thought about adopting. But Bert had been against it, and she let it go.

Maybe she'd let too many things go. But maybe not.

Helen frowned as she picked up one more circular advertising what she thought of as places to go rot. Assisted living facilities. Senior communities. Adventures in Mature Living.

Old Folks Homes was what they'd called them back in her day, and she wasn't fooled by the new euphemisms. She and Bert had made a promise that neither of them would ever put the other in one of those God-awful places. But well, now Bert wasn't here anymore.

She got to the last piece of mail and sighed. As usual, there was no postcard from Jeremy.

You're just being silly, she told herself, as she walked up the stairs to the second floor, picking up the small basket of folded clothes, a magazine and a new tube of toothpaste on her way. It wasn't quite as easy as it used to be to go up and down those stairs, and she'd taken to depositing items on the bottom step that belonged upstairs so that she could carry them up in a single trip when she was going up there anyway. You're just being silly, she repeated inside her head, but she still went into the bedroom, set the basket down, and opened the bottom drawer of her antique writing desk, taking out the oblong wooden box that held things worth remembering.

Her high school ring was in there - heaven knows why she kept that after all these years, but she had - as well as some letters Bert wrote to her when he was in Vietnam and every day had been a walking nightmare of wondering if he'd ever make it home again. Those letters were ragged from rereading, and stained by not a few tears. But they weren't what drew her to the box today.

Possibilities. That's what Jeremy had been. Maybe not so much possibilities, but potential. He'd been one of the neighborhood kids, a shy boy who when he was little as often as not had bruises on his arms, and sometimes a black eye. She'd known what was going on. Everyone did. But back then you didn't pick up the phone and call the police because you thought one of your neighbors was abusing his kid. Jeremy's father had been in the war too. They didn't call it PTSD then. They just called it terrors, or having spells, so people felt sorry for him, and looked the other way.

But Helen remembered feeling secretly relieved the morning the police showed up, three blocks over, with sirens wailing, and everyone later found out that the man had gone down into his basement and shot himself. Helen had been relieved, and not sorry about it. She'd given herself a penance of a hundred rosaries, because she couldn't even confess to the priest how she'd not only been happy he was dead, but how often she'd actually wished something like that would happen.

Anyway, Jeremy kept coming by, just one more in the groups of neighborhood kids who used to stop by her back door on their way home from school, since she had a reputation for baking cookies. She'd invite them into her kitchen, give them a cookie and maybe a glass of milk, and hear all about their day. It made up a little bit for not having kids of her own. Then they'd get a little older, eventually stop coming by. All except for Jeremy.

"You were the one person I could count on when things were bad at home," he'd once told her, and she'd been embarrassed.

"All I did was give you milk and cookies," she'd told him.

And he'd said that had been plenty. But she'd wished she'd done a little bit more.

Helen pulled out what she was looking for - a tattered postcard, once shiny, now faded. Jeremy's scrawled handwriting on the back. "Hey Mrs. G, on my way, write you from LA! XO Jeremy." She sighed. He'd gotten out of Philly. This was all the proof she'd ever needed. And if she never got a postcard from California, well, that was fine. She liked to imagine him living his new life there.

God, had it really been 20 years since he'd sat in her kitchen that last time? She'd given him the envelop with the $1,500 she'd gotten in the unexpected bequest from Aunt Maude who she'd never even really liked, and God knows why she'd even been in her will, but sometimes things happen for a reason. And maybe that reason had been so that she could give Jeremy the gift of a new life.

He'd been what, 18, 19, then? And when she looked in his face she could still see the little boy who used to sit at that same table with the bruises and the sad eyes.

This version had a bruised face and sad eyes too, and he'd told her about some trouble he got into with a gang she'd heard about on the news.

She'd heard about Jeremy, too. It had been all over the neighborhood, how he was hanging around with the wrong crowd and maybe even selling drugs. And people had shook their head and said what a shame it was, his father a suicide, and his mother half drunk all the time and not paying attention to anything anymore except where her next bottle of wine was coming from. And how the plants in front of their house didn't get tended and the place was starting to look run down.

Jeremy had sat at her table and she'd given him a plate of cookies and a glass of milk just like the old days, and he gulped the milk down and told her he'd gotten into some trouble and if he didn't get out of town they were going to hurt him bad, worse than his father ever had.

And she asked him flat out was he buying and selling drugs, and he said No, Mrs. G, I swear, and looked her straight in the eyes and she believed him.

"We could have gone on a cruise with that money," Bert said later when she told him what she'd done.

"It's my money," she'd said in return.

"Not any more," Bert had said, with an ugly laugh that she didn't appreciate, not at all.

Oh, he'd had another laugh at her expense when she got the postcard a week or so later. "It's from Pittsburgh!" he said. "He's probably back here in Philly already, and spent your money on drugs. I hope you're happy now."

But she was happy. And thinking about Jeremy, imagining what his life had become away from the sadness and the bad history and the gangs that had tried to pull him in. She'd never been to California herself, but she knew what it was like from TV, and she imagined Jeremy out there on some beach with the Pacific Ocean in the background. Or maybe that giant Hollywood sign on the hill.

She'd never heard from Jeremy again, but that was okay.

Helen pulled out another piece of paper, carefully folded into its envelope. It was a letter, the date faded but the insignia still bold, addressed to her under her maiden name. Agreeing to defer her college admission for one year.

She'd planned to go that next year. Or maybe the year after that. She really had.

But Bert had been drafted, and they'd gotten married in a rush, and when he'd come back there'd been the chance to buy this house, and the years had slipped away and by the time it mattered it was too late.

And now, all of a sudden, it appeared that she was old. She didn't feel old, but those idiots who kept sending her the flyers for the stupid senior living communities apparently thought she was. And most of the neighbors she'd known here for so many years had moved away - probably seduced by one of those damn flyers, she thought - while others had just up and died like Bert, without even a warning. And there were new families with young kids now, but she didn't really know them, and times had changed. Kids went to after school programs now, and sports practice, and ballet class, and a hundred other things. They didn't walk home from school anymore and stop by a neighbor's kitchen for cookies.

She looked down and realized she was holding the letter from the college so tightly she was crushing it. Usually when she went through this box she felt bittersweet memories flood over her. And it was a sort of comfort. An easing of the solitude that had become her life.

Today she suddenly felt something different. She'd had a good life, a full one. But maybe it wasn't over yet. Maybe - just maybe - she deserved to have a little bit more.

She sat down at the desk and opened her laptop, feeling a bit smug that she had a laptop and knew how to use it, when so many of the dwindling number of her contemporaries would rather watch reruns of sitcoms on TV than browse the Internet. But after all, hadn't it been Helen who pushed for new computers at the library five years before she retired?

She pulled up the website for the college and felt her heart skip a beat as she moved to the Admissions page. Oh, tuition wasn't what it used to be, she realized with a bit of a shock, then thought, the hell with it, she could sell the house. The mortgage was paid off years ago, and God knows there were plenty of young families wanting to move into this neighborhood. It was too much house for one person anymore anyways. And there was more than one diner that sold a decent slice of coconut cream pie.

It was the only address Jeremy had for her, she thought, pausing for a moment. What if he sent a letter and she wasn't there? Surely the Post Office would forward her mail. Besides, if he really wanted to find her, it wouldn't be that hard.

You're a foolish old woman, she told herself. A college that accepted you when you were in your 20's doesn't want you more than half a century later.

But she started typing the email anyway, then pushed "Send" before she could change her mind.

Then she went back downstairs, went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk. She might even bake some cookies this afternoon. Realtors always said the smell of fresh baked cookies was perfect for an open house, so it was time she got back in practice.

Maybe Jeremy wasn't the one that got away. Maybe the gangs pulled him back in. Maybe he's been dead for 20 years. Then again, maybe he's happy and living the good life in California. Maybe she'd never know.

And maybe - just maybe - she'd be the one that got away. 

Author's Note:  Thank you for reading my short story. It's my first attempt at literary fiction, and I would love to know what you think.