The Forever Gift

Penny Bassett learns from a phone call with her father that Mrs. Beacham, her beloved high school art teacher, is retiring after forty-five years. Penny asks Wooton if they can make the trip to Pittsburgh for the farewell ceremony, and Wooton cheerfully agrees to a spontaneous getaway. In Pittsburgh they meet up with Penny's parents, Frank and Eleanor Wise, at a fish restaurant, where Penny can't stop wondering why Mrs. Beacham would retire at all - and whether she might be talked out of it.

At the high school, Penny gives Wooton a tour of her memories, including the hallway where she once got in trouble for rollerblading between classes. In her old art room, room 114, she shows him the wall where Mrs. Beacham displayed exceptional student work. Penny remembers the day her pencil sketch of a tape dispenser was hung there and Mrs. Beacham told her she had a gift; that, she says, was the day she became an artist. But the wall now holds classic paintings instead, put up by Lincoln Harper, the new art teacher. Mr. Harper explains that he won't be displaying student art at all. He believes art is personal expression and doesn't want teenagers thinking in terms of good art and bad art or working to impress anyone. Penny politely pushes back, remembering how much Mrs. Beacham's praise encouraged her, but Mr. Harper isn't budging - and neither is Penny. She marches off determined to convince Mrs. Beacham to keep teaching.

The reunion starts beautifully. Mrs. Beacham remembers Penny, and even remembers the tape dispenser drawing, which nearly moves Penny to tears. But when Penny starts hinting that the new teacher can't replace her, Mrs. Beacham gently explains that she's tired and that sometimes a person simply knows it's time. "Things change. Things end. They have to," she says. Penny seems to accept this - until, as Wooton steers her away, she suddenly shouts, "Don't go, Mrs. Beacham! You can't be a quitter!" before Wooton hustles her out of the room.

Mortified, Penny decides a nice card in the mail is a safer way to apologize than her mouth. To cheer her up, the family plans dessert at Pie Me to the Moon, the little pie shop where Eleanor always took young Penny when she was upset. Wooton suggests the two of them go alone for old times' sake while he and Frank head back to the RV. But the pie shop has become a laundromat. The old neighborhood park is no better: the merry-go-round barely creaks around, the swings are just hanging chains, and a newer park has left this one forgotten.

Back at the RV, Frank shows Wooton a contraption he built for Eleanor years ago: every night at exactly nine o'clock, a timer drops a pebble into a bucket, and the extra weight pulls a little heart on a pulley a millimeter higher - because he loves her a little more every day. The couple has watched it together every night for years. Wooton wishes he had something like that for Penny.

Meanwhile, Penny and Eleanor visit Mario's, their old Thursday-night pizza place. Mario doesn't remember his self-proclaimed "favorite customers," talks them out of ordering pepperoni so he won't have to wash another pan, and announces he's going out of business in a week, ever since a trendy avocado-pizza restaurant opened on Main Street. Horrified, Penny vows to fill the place with customers that very night, but Eleanor's phone calls come up empty. When Wooton and Frank arrive, Penny insists everyone order extra-large pizzas - until she finally takes a bite of her own and has to admit the truth: the pizza is terrible, and probably always was. She only remembered it as wonderful because she was a kid. Crushed, she asks why everything has to change and walks off alone.

Wooton finds her and offers chocolate - and a present: two tickets to Waterworld in a frame, dated fifty years in the future. Penny asked whether anything lasts, and Wooton has an answer: their marriage. He wants to hang the frame on their wall and, in fifty years, take the tickets out and go to Waterworld together. When Penny worries the park might close like Mario's, Wooton admits things change, but says some things change for the better. "I love you with Jesus' love," he tells her - a love that only grows deeper and stronger. They laugh about their future selves watching grandchildren on the slides, dangling their feet in the pool, and holding hands over licorice.

Just before nine o'clock, Wooton pulls Penny to peek inside the RV, where her parents sit together watching the nightly pebble fall and the little heart rise, trading "love yous" as they have for years. Penny realizes she just needs to look around a little more when she wants to see something that lasts.