The Trucker I Fed at a Denny’s in 2011 Just Bought My Foreclosed House Back for Me

I wiped my face on the hem of my shirt and I walked down the hallway of the house that was mine again and I opened the front door.

Walter was standing on the porch.

He had a paper bag from the grocery store in one arm.

He looked, if anything, more nervous than I felt.

“I know I said the kitchen table,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to come. But I thought. I thought maybe you’d have questions. And I thought you shouldn’t have to be alone with the answers.”

I stared at him.

“I brought pie,” he said, holding up the bag.

“It felt like the right thing.”

I started laughing, and then I started crying, and I couldn’t stop doing either one, and Emma came around the corner from the kitchen with a worried face and said, “Mom, who is this?”

I looked at my daughter.

I looked at Walter.

I looked at the pink foreclosure notice on the entryway table where I’d dropped it that morning, a lifetime ago.

“Emma,” I said.

“This is Mr. Hendricks. He’s a friend. Go finish your homework, honey. We’re going to have pie in a little bit.”

She looked at Walter carefully.

Emma is a careful child.

She has been a careful child since she was four and started throwing up from chemo and learned that the world was not always safe.

Whatever she saw in Walter’s face, it passed her test.

She said, “Okay,” and went back to the kitchen.

I let him in.

We sat at the kitchen table, the three of us, and Walter had brought two pies, apple and cherry, and a block of cheddar cheese, and Emma looked at the cheese with deep suspicion and Walter said, “Try it on the apple. Trust me,” and she did, and her eyebrows went up, and she said, “That is really weird and really good.”

Walter laughed.

It was the first time I’d heard him laugh and it sounded like a man who had learned how to do it again after forgetting.

After Emma took her pie into the living room to watch her show, I sat across from Walter at my grandmother’s kitchen table, and I said the thing I had been trying to figure out how to say for two hours.

“Walter. I can’t accept this.”

He nodded.

He didn’t look surprised.

“I figured you might say that.”

“It’s a house. It’s a whole house. You can’t. People don’t. This isn’t.”

“Rebecca,” he said.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Okay.”

“That night. When you fed me. Did it feel like a big thing to you?”

I thought about it.

“No,” I said.

“It was just a plate of eggs.”

“Right,” he said.

“It was just a plate of eggs. To you. It was the difference between me being here and not being here. To me.”

He took a sip of his coffee.

His hands were rough and scarred from a lifetime of loading and unloading trucks.

“The house is a big thing to you,” he said.

“It’s not a big thing to me. I have more money than I know what to do with. I have no wife. I have no children. I have a sister in Oregon who I love and who does not need my money. I have been driving around the country for a year looking for somebody who deserved some of it, and the person I kept coming back to was you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know one thing about you,” he said.

“I know what you did when you thought no one was watching. That’s the only thing worth knowing about a person.”

I looked down at the deed on the table.

My name in gold letters.

“Emma is healthy,” I said, and I don’t know why I said it.

“She was sick. Leukemia. She’s been in remission for four years. That’s why I took out the second mortgage. The treatments.”

“I know,” Walter said gently.

“I asked around.”

“You asked around a lot.”

“I asked around enough to be sure I wasn’t giving a house to somebody who was going to waste it.”

I looked up sharply.

He was smiling, just a little.

“I’m kidding, Rebecca. Mostly.”

I laughed, one hard laugh that came out like a hiccup.

“Walter. What do you want.”

He was quiet for a long time.

He turned his coffee cup in his hands.

He looked out my kitchen window at the maple tree in the backyard, the one my grandfather had planted in 1962.

“I want to know your name,” he said finally.

“That’s what I wanted for eleven months. I wanted to know the name of the woman who fed me. I have it now. Rebecca Anne Collier. That’s what I wanted.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all I came for. Everything else. The house. The pie. Coming to the door tonight. That’s just. That’s me trying to figure out how to be a person again, I think. After Diane. It’s been thirteen years and I still don’t know how.”

I reached across the table and I put my hand on top of his.

He closed his eyes.

We sat like that for a while.

Emma’s cartoon was playing in the living room.

The furnace kicked on.

Outside, a dog barked twice and then stopped.

“Walter,” I said.

“I have a proposition.”

He opened his eyes.

“I’m not going to accept the house as a gift. I can’t. I don’t have it in me. It would eat at me every day for the rest of my life and I would come to resent you for it, and I don’t want to resent you.”

Something in his face fell, just a little.

“But,” I said.

“I will accept it as a loan.”

He tilted his head.

“I’ll pay you back,” I said.

“It’ll take me the rest of my working life. I’ll pay you what I can every month. No interest. If I die before it’s paid off, Emma will pay the rest. You’ll have a deed in a drawer somewhere that says I owe you, and you’ll never call it in, and I’ll pay it anyway. That’s the deal.”

Walter looked at me for a long time.

“That’s a bad deal for you,” he said.

“You’d own the house free and clear if you took the gift.”

“I know.”

“Why.”

“Because,” I said, “the plate of eggs wasn’t a loan either. And you spent thirteen years feeling like you owed me. I don’t want to spend thirteen years feeling like I owe you. If it’s a debt, I can carry it. If it’s a gift that big, it’ll break me.”

He nodded slowly.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah, okay. I understand that.”

He put out his hand across the table.

I shook it.

“One condition from me,” he said.

“Name it.”

“You let me come to dinner sometimes. When you’re not too tired from the diner. I don’t have anywhere to be. I sold the trucking company. I live in a hotel in Cranston right now trying to figure out what to do next. I would like to know a family again. If you’d let me.”

“Walter,” I said.

“You just bought my grandmother’s house back for me. You can come to dinner whenever you want.”

He smiled, and this time it reached all the way up into those crinkled eyes, and I saw for the first time the shape of the man he must have been before Diane got sick.

Emma came back into the kitchen with her empty pie plate.

“Mr. Hendricks,” she said.

“Can I have another piece?”

“Emma, that’s rude,” I said.

“It’s not rude,” Walter said.

“It’s an excellent question. And the answer is yes.”

He cut her another piece.

He put a slice of cheddar on it without asking.

Emma took a bite and said, “You should come over on Sunday. Mom makes pot roast on Sundays.”

Walter looked at me.

I nodded.

“Sunday,” he said.

“I’d be honored.”

After he left, Emma stood at the front window watching his pickup truck pull out of our driveway.

“Mom,” she said.

“Who is that really?”

I thought about how to answer her.

“He’s a man I was kind to a long time ago,” I said.

“Before you were born. When I didn’t know it mattered.”

Emma considered this.

“Was he sad?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“He was very sad.”

“Is he less sad now?”

I thought about Walter’s face when I put my hand on his.

“I think he’s getting there, honey.”

She nodded like this made complete sense to her, which at eleven years old maybe it did.

Then she said, “Mom. Why were you crying earlier?”

I sat down on the couch and I pulled her into my lap even though she’s really too big for it now.

“I was crying because something scary was going to happen to us,” I said.

“And then it didn’t.”

“Because of Mr. Hendricks?”

“Because of Mr. Hendricks. And because of something I did a long time ago that I forgot about.”

She thought about this for a while, her head against my shoulder.

“So being nice to people,” she said, “is like planting seeds.”

“Yeah, baby,” I said.

“Something like that.”

I did not tell her about the revolver in the glovebox.

I will tell her someday, when she is older and can hold the weight of what her mother did without knowing she was doing it.

But not tonight.

Tonight I just sat on the couch with my daughter in the house that was ours again, and I looked at the deed on the kitchen table with my name on it in gold letters, and I thought about a plate of eggs in November of 2011, and I let myself cry one more time, quietly, into my daughter’s hair.