The time capsule was supposed to stay buried until June of 2037, and the man on Ruth Ann Mercer's porch said they didn't have that long.
Ruth Ann knew him the moment she opened the door. He was forty-nine now, gray at the temples, with reading glasses pushed up on his head and a canvas jacket. But she'd have known those ears anywhere.
"Wade Sutter," she said. "Wade Allen Sutter."
He laughed. It came out a little shaky. "You still remember my middle name."
"I remember every middle name I ever wrote on a report card, honey," Ruth Ann said. "Come in out of the cold."
Ruth Ann was sixty-nine. She'd taught third grade at Pine Hollow Elementary for thirty-eight years, and Wade Sutter had been in her class twice.
She'd held him back in the spring of 1987. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done as a teacher. He'd been a sweet, quiet, big-eared boy who couldn't read, not really, and who'd spent most of second grade hiding it.
His parents had been furious. Wade had cried in the coat closet.
She'd spent the next year teaching him to read, after school, two afternoons a week, at the kitchen table in this very house.
Wade Sutter had grown up to write books. Four of them, all set in southern Ohio, and the last one had been on a list in the New York Times.
He'd sent her a signed copy of each one. They were on the shelf by the window.
"It's Molly," Wade said, sitting at her kitchen table. "Molly Ames."
Ruth Ann put down the coffee pot.
Molly Ames had sat in the front row in 1986. Freckles, braids, and her hand up for every question before Ruth Ann had finished asking it. She'd helped Wade with his spelling words without anybody telling her to.
"She's in hospice," Wade said. "In Marietta. Cancer. They're saying a few weeks. Maybe less." He looked down at his cup. "She asked about the time capsule. She remembers what she wrote in her letter, kind of. She wants to read it. Before."
Ruth Ann remembered the time capsule.
In May of 1987, her class had buried it on the playground at Pine Hollow Elementary. A steel ammunition box from the Army surplus store in Zanesville, painted silver. Inside it, each of the twenty-two children had put a letter to their grown-up selves, sealed in an envelope, plus a newspaper and a cassette tape of the class singing "We Are the World."
They'd agreed to open it fifty years later, in 2037.
It had rained that morning. The children had worn their slickers out to the playground, and the hole had been half full of muddy water.
Molly Ames had made a speech standing on an upturned bucket, and Wade had held the shovel like it was a flag. Ruth Ann had written it on a plaque and given it to the principal.
Wade looked at her across the table the way he used to look at a page of spelling words.
"We have to dig it up," Wade said. "Now. I already called the school. They said it's fine, if we can find it."
"If we can find it?"
Wade's face changed. "That's the other thing," he said.
The principal of Pine Hollow Elementary was a young woman named Kristen Doane. She met them on the playground the next afternoon, with a man from the school maintenance crew and a small backhoe.
She had a folder. In the folder was a copy of the plaque, and a single typed line from the school records of 1986.
Time capsule, Mrs. Mercer's third grade, 1987, buried four feet north of the flagpole.
"So we dug four feet north of the flagpole this morning," Kristen said apologetically. "Down three feet. There's nothing there."
Ruth Ann looked at the flagpole. Then she looked around.
The playground she remembered was gone. The old swing sets were gone, and the merry-go-round, and the monkey bars.
In 1999, the school had been expanded, and half the old playground had been paved over for a new parking lot and a basketball court. The flagpole had been moved forty feet to stand in front of the new entrance.
"The flagpole moved," Ruth Ann said.
"The flagpole moved," Kristen agreed. "In 1999. And the old flagpole was where the basketball court is now."
They stood there and looked at the basketball court. It was a hundred feet of blacktop with a chain-link fence around it.
"We can't tear up the whole court," Kristen said gently. "Not on a guess. I'm sorry, Mrs. Mercer. I'd need the school board, and an engineer, and it would take months."
Wade put his hands in his jacket pockets and stared at the blacktop.
"I paced it off," he said quietly. "I remember. You let me do it, Mrs. Mercer, because I was the tallest. Twenty steps from the big oak tree toward the flagpole. You said that way, we'd always know."
Ruth Ann turned around.
The big oak tree was still there, at the edge of the field behind the school, bare and huge against the March sky.
But Wade had been nine years old when he paced it off. Twenty steps. Ruth Ann had no idea how long a nine-year-old's steps were, forty years ago, or which way he'd been facing, or whether he'd counted right.
And Molly Ames had a few weeks. Maybe less.