I Paid for a Trucker’s Breakfast in 1998. Last Tuesday His Daughter Handed Me the Keys to a House
Part 3: The Reason She Couldn’t Wait
She let go of my hand and reached into her purse again.
This time she pulled out a photograph.
She laid it on the table facing me. It was a color photo, faded at the edges, the kind you got back from the drugstore in a paper sleeve. A little girl with dark hair on a hardware store porch, maybe five years old. Behind her, a man in a Peterbilt cap crouched down with his hand on her shoulder, laughing at something off-camera.
He had a good face. Weathered. Tired around the eyes but laughing.
“That’s the store,” Colleen said. “That’s me. That’s him.”
“He looks kind.”
“He was.”
She took a breath.
“Marlene, my brother doesn’t know.”
I looked up.
“He doesn’t know about the Waffle House. He doesn’t know about the note in the visor. He doesn’t know Dad almost. He doesn’t know about you. My mother knew and I know and that’s it. Dad told me in the hospital and he made me promise. He said Sean wasn’t built to carry that. He said Sean would spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with a thing that big.”
“Then why.”
“Because Sean is contesting the house.”
I sat back.
“He got the letter the same day I did,” she said. “Different envelope. Ours went out together. He called me that night. He said, who is Marlene Whitfield. He said, why is Dad giving a house to a woman we’ve never heard of. He said, is this a mistake, is this dementia, was Dad having an affair, what is this.”
“Oh.”
“He filed something on Friday. A challenge. His lawyer says Dad wasn’t of sound mind at the time of the transfer. Which is not true. Dad was on morphine at the very end but the paperwork was six months before that, and he was sharp, and there are two witnesses at the lawyer’s office who will say so.”
“Colleen.”
“He’s not a bad person, my brother. He’s scared. Our mother is dead, our father just died, and a stranger has our childhood house. I understand him being scared. I don’t know how to tell him the truth without breaking him and I don’t know how to protect the house without telling him the truth.”
She looked at the photograph on the table.
“Dad told me I could tell you,” she said. “He said if it came to a fight I could tell you everything. He said he trusted you to know what to do. He said, she was smart enough to know what a man at a counter needed at four in the morning, she’ll be smart enough to know what my son needs now.”
I looked at the little girl in the photo.
I looked at the man behind her.
I did not know that man. I had sat two seats down from him for maybe twelve minutes of my life. He had watched me through the reflection in the window of a Waffle House and remembered a coat for twenty-six years.
“What does Sean do,” I said.
“He runs the store now. He took it over when Dad got sick. He’s good at it. He’s better at it than Dad was, honestly.”
“He’s married?”
“Two kids. Six and three.”
“Does he live in the Sycamore house?”
She hesitated.
“He grew up in it,” she said. “He and his wife live across town. But when Mom died he talked about moving into it. He hasn’t. It’s just been sitting there.”
I nodded slowly.
“Colleen,” I said, “I want you to listen to me. Because I’ve been sixty-three years old for eight months now and I’ve earned the right to say things out loud.”
She waited.
“I am not moving to Cedar Rapids. I have three grandchildren twenty minutes from this porch. I have a book club I don’t like but I go to it anyway. I have a garden that took me eleven years to get right. I am not leaving.”
“Okay.”
“And I am not taking a house from a man who’s scared his father didn’t love him.”
“He knows Dad loved him.”
“Honey, he does not know that right now. Right now he knows his father gave a house to a stranger.”
She looked down at her hands.
“So what do you want to do,” she said.
I thought about it.
I looked at the photograph, and I looked at the note on my table, and I thought about a man in a parking lot tearing a piece of paper into pieces and driving home to become somebody’s husband and somebody’s father and somebody who ran a hardware store for fifteen years.
“I need to think about it overnight,” I said. “Can you come back tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“Are you staying somewhere.”
“There’s a Hampton off the highway.”
“Stay here. I have a guest room. It has a quilt on the bed my mother made in 1974 and it smells like mothballs but the sheets are clean.”
She started to cry again.
“Okay,” she said.
That night I sat on the porch after she’d gone to bed and I watched the road and I thought about what I owed a dead man I had never met.
I thought about Doug, who I’d left for good in 2003, five years after that Waffle House, on a Tuesday afternoon with a suitcase and no note.
I thought about my daughter Rachel, who was three years old that February morning, asleep at my mother’s house while I sat at a counter with forty-seven dollars and a decision I hadn’t made yet.
I thought about the fact that I hadn’t paid for that man’s eggs to save his life. I had paid for them because I was twenty-eight and heartbroken and I needed to prove to myself that I was still the kind of person who did things like that. It had been for me. Not for him.
And he had spent twenty-six years thinking it was for him.
Maybe that was okay.
Maybe that was actually what kindness was, when it worked. Two people, neither one knowing the whole shape of the thing, both getting what they needed out of a moment that didn’t belong to either of them.
Around midnight I went inside and I got out a legal pad.
I started writing.
I wrote until almost three in the morning, and when I was done I put the pad on the kitchen table where Colleen would see it in the morning, and I went to bed.
At six-thirty I heard her in the kitchen making coffee. I heard the pages of the legal pad turning. Then I heard nothing for a long time.
When I came down she was sitting at the table with her hands wrapped around a mug and her face wet.
“Marlene,” she said.
“Read it back to me.”
“You’re sure.”
“Read it back to me so I know I meant it.”
She picked up the top page.