"Middy Sweet Young, a wealthy widow bearing a baffling disease, returns to Creel, her hometown, in search of her youth lured by a promise she had made to Luke Mercer, her high school boyfriend: "One day we'll be together....Maybe in our eighties. Maybe before, but it's going to happen." The Forever Wish of Middy Sweet is the story of that prophecy-a former beauty queen and a retired history teacher reunite fifty years after the vow. It is a prophecy that will haunt Luke. A widower, he has settled comfortably as a father and grandfather, as a friend to such people as the barber Roy Kennedy, as a surprising and unlikely football legend, as the local historian, as a dedicated volunteer for the library. In a small town where core values have remained relatively unchanged, Luke is the model citizen-quiet, reflective, patient, caring-yet Middy's sudden and unexpected appearance in his life brings with it uncertainty and confusion. He does not know her life has been that of a trophy wife to a controlling lawyer in Nashville, Tennessee, or that she has developed an obsessive yearning for the fantasy of what might have been with Luke. He does not know she has chosen him to be her guide to re-live hallowed memories of youth, or that she would share with him unsettling experiences-from her mother's alcoholism to her husband's cruelty. And he does not know that as he shares stories with Middy of their time together, he will be drawn back into his own memories of boyhood and of the life he had spent with Hannah, his late wife, and of his own reasons to return to Creel. And he wonders if Middy had been right-that some things were meant to be"-- Provided by publisher.