I Filled a Stranger’s Gas Tank in 2011 With My Last $40. Last Tuesday, His Widow Knocked on My Door.

Part 3: What Ray Didn’t Know

I sat down across from her. My hands were shaking and I put them under my thighs to stop it.

“Your husband found me because he wanted to say thank you.”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t know why I did it.”

She waited.

“I was going to kill myself that night.” I heard myself say it in the same voice I use to tell a patient they need a crown. Flat. Professional. “The $40 was all the cash I had on me. I wasn’t going to need it. I’d written a note. It was in the glovebox.”

Marlene didn’t move.

“When I saw him at the pump,” I said, “and his card kept getting declined, and I could see the kids in the back, I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about being kind. I was thinking, I’m not going to need this money, and he does. That was it. That was the whole thought.”

I looked at the floor.

“And then I drove past the exit I was going to use.”

“Why?” she said. Softly. Not like she was challenging me. Like she was asking the question Ray would have asked.

“I’ve been trying to figure that out for fourteen years.”

She nodded. She looked down at her hands. She had a wedding ring on, and a smaller ring above it that must have been her mother’s, and her knuckles were red.

“Ray tried to kill himself once,” she said. “In 1998. Before I met him.”

I looked up.

“He didn’t talk about it much. He’d been in the Army. He came home and things were bad for a while. He said the only reason he didn’t do it was because a woman at a diner refilled his coffee without him asking and told him he looked like he needed a piece of pie. He said she gave him the pie and didn’t charge him and he sat there and ate it and he thought, well, I can wait one more day.”

She smiled a little.

“He never found her either. He said he thought about looking. But then he thought maybe she wouldn’t want to know what she’d done. Maybe it would scare her.”

“So he wrote it down.”

“He wrote everything down.” Marlene laughed, and it turned into a cough, and she waved her hand. “Sorry. I’m getting over something. He kept notebooks his whole life. About the kids, about work, about me. He said if he didn’t write it down it didn’t happen.”

I thought about my mother. About how she used to write my father letters she never sent. How after she died my sister and I found a whole drawer of them, and we didn’t read them, we burned them in the fireplace because it felt like what she would have wanted.

I wondered if that had been the right thing to do.

“Marlene,” I said. “I don’t understand what you meant. On the porch. About me deciding.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she stood up, and she walked back to the kitchen table, and she came back with the flag.

“Ray was a veteran,” she said. “This is his. From his service. When he was dying, he asked me to bring you the notebooks. And he asked me to bring you this.”

She held it out.

“He said, tell him if he doesn’t want it, keep it, throw it away, do whatever. But offer it. He said, tell him it belongs to someone who did something.”

I stared at it.

“I don’t understand.”

“He said you saved his life.”

“He was out of gas. That’s not saving his life.”

Marlene sat down again. She held the flag in her lap.

“Do you know what our life looked like in February 2011?”

I shook my head.

“Ray had been out of work for eleven months. We had two babies. We had $12 in the bank. That night, on the way to the gas station, he had told me he was going to sell his hunting rifle in the morning. It was his father’s. He didn’t want to. But we didn’t have a choice.”

She looked at the flag.

“Ray wasn’t going to kill himself that night. I don’t want you to think that. He was past that. But I want you to understand what that gas station was for us. If we hadn’t been able to get home, we would have had to call his brother, and his brother would have said things Ray couldn’t come back from. He would have said them in front of the kids. And Ray was already so close to breaking.”

She was quiet for a second.

“After you gave him that money, he came home and he sat at the kitchen table and he cried for an hour. And then he stopped crying. And he said, Marlene, I’m going to figure this out. And two weeks later he took a job stocking shelves at a Fareway that he’d been too proud to take before. And eight months after that he got into the apprentice program at Deere. And ten years after that he owned this house free and clear.”

She put her hand flat on the flag.

“He told the kids about you. All three of them. Every February 19th we had breakfast for dinner because that was what we’d been going home to cook that night. And he told them, a stranger did something kind for us when we needed it, and we don’t know his name, but he changed the shape of our life. And someday, if you have the chance, you do it back.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were wet.

“So when Ray asked me to give you his flag, he wasn’t giving you a piece of cloth. He was telling you that you are family. He was telling you that in his head, for fourteen years, you were the reason he made it. And he wanted you to know before he died. And he ran out of time. So I came instead.”

I couldn’t say anything.

I hadn’t cried at my mother’s funeral. I hadn’t cried at my divorce. I hadn’t cried the night I poured the Jim Beam down the sink.

I cried at my kitchen table in Cedar Falls in front of a woman I’d met forty minutes ago, and she didn’t say anything, she just sat there with her husband’s flag in her lap, and when I could finally speak I said, “I don’t deserve this.”

And Marlene said, “That’s not really the point of it, is it.”

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