Just Once: A Novel

Once upon a wooden chest, “Painted across the top in fine black lettering was a simple message: The story of Hank and Irvel…a love that could only happen just once.” It all begins in the spring of 1931 when two twelve year old preteens diverge from their regular route along the sidewalk and toward a rushing creek. “Just once.” And it ends with a video shoot in the park to “tell our love story on camera. For..me and Hank, and for whoever might want to know our story, our beautiful, breathtaking love story” of “two people who were supposed to be dead were instead as alive as they’d ever been. Promising each other forever…Irvel and Hank Myers. A love story for the ages. The World War II spy…and the marine who would love her more than life. Even long after the music stopped playing…The two of them clinging to each other for dear life. For dear love.” Decades later, her granddaughter discovers her grandparents' story and memorializes it in a novel. “She turned to the first page. For Irvel and Hank, that your daring, heroic love story might be remembered forever. She ran her hand over the image on the cover, a young couple much the way her Grandma Irvel and Grandpa Hank might’ve looked during World War II. And below that, the only title that could ever have worked. The one Irvel would’ve given it, had she been here. JUST ONCE.” “A book dies if it’s left on the shelf…stories like the one between Hank and Irvel connect us. The characters become like family as they draw our hearts together.” This Veterans’ Day–like all Veterans’ Days–I hung the American flag in my classroom, but I took “a moment longer to appreciate the real-life men and women who made our freedoms possible. People like Hank and Irvel and Sam…From now on, when I thank a serviceman or servicewoman for their military sacrifice, my gratitude will always run deeper than before.”