Long before Jim Garraty stood on the curb in Somerville, watching a Corolla disappear into the quiet, there was a boy sitting in a sunlit classroom, speechless at the sound of someone saying “Hi.”
I wrote about Maria in Catalyst back in 1987. She was radiant, kind, and achingly real. We shared benches between buildings and stolen glances in class. And then she was gone — off to California with a promise to write a letter that never arrived. It wasn’t heartbreak in the cinematic sense. It was quieter than that. But it stayed.
Years later, writing Comings and Goings, I didn’t set out to rewrite that moment. But memory has its ways. And maybe, on some level, Maria lives in Kelly’s soft smile or in the quiet question Jim asks outside his building: “Will I see you again?”
“Maybe,” she said. “We’ll see.” No promises. Just the truth, wrapped in kindness.
It’s not that the Garratyverse is my memoir. It isn’t. But perhaps it’s built on a scaffolding of moments like those: brief connections, shy gestures, small kindnesses that echo longer than we expect. I didn’t plan for Maria to be part of Jim’s story—but I recognize her now, folded into its DNA.
We don’t always know what shapes us. Sometimes, we only notice when we look back and realize the ache in our fiction started long before we called ourselves storytellers
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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