The Trucker I Fed at Denny’s in 2011 Just Bought Me the House I Was About to Lose
Part 4: The Rain Check
I did not call him for a long time.
Two months, almost three. Not because I didn’t want to. Because I didn’t know what the call was for, and I didn’t want to make it until I did.
In those months, a lot of small things happened that would have felt normal to anyone else, and felt enormous to me. I bought Ruby new sneakers without doing math in my head first. I got the porch fixed, the sagging left side, by a man named Earl who charged me four hundred dollars and did it in a Saturday. I filled the gas tank all the way up instead of putting in twenty. I slept through the night twice.
I also did some things that were harder.
I opened all the mail I had been avoiding. Every envelope. There were forty-three of them in a pile in the laundry room. Some of them were bills I still owed. Some of them were condolence cards from Danny’s coworkers I had never read. One was a handwritten letter from Danny’s aunt in Missouri asking if she could come visit Ruby, sent seven months ago, never answered.
I called Danny’s aunt. She cried. I cried. She came out for a weekend in December and Ruby remembered her from before and it was easier than I thought it would be, and also harder in places I didn’t expect.
I did not become a different person. I want to be clear about that. Getting the house didn’t fix me. I still had bad days. I still had a Wednesday in November where I sat on the closet floor holding one of Danny’s shirts and could not make myself stand up for two hours. Grief doesn’t take a foreclosure release and go home.
But I stopped, in some small way, feeling like I was drowning.
In January, I called Frank.
He picked up on the second ring. “Katie.”
“Hi Frank.”
“Hi.”
Neither of us said anything for a second.
“The rain check,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Are you, do you still, is that still”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
He came for dinner on a Sunday. I made a pot roast because it was the thing I made when I wanted people to feel welcome. He brought a pie from a bakery in Wichita, apologetic, saying he couldn’t bake.
Ruby remembered him. She showed him her new sneakers. She showed him a drawing she had made in school of our family, which was her and me and Danny in the clouds and now, apparently, a stick figure with silver hair labeled *FRANK.* I saw him look at it and look away fast.
We ate. We talked about nothing much. His sister was recovering well. Ruby’s class was doing a unit on the solar system and she had opinions about Pluto.
After Ruby went to bed, Frank and I sat on the fixed porch with two cups of decaf and it was cold but not unbearable, and he said:
“I want to tell you something and I want you to know I’m not asking for anything.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been thinking about starting a scholarship. Small one. For kids in Salina whose parents work service jobs. Waitresses, line cooks, motel housekeepers. Toward nursing school or trade school. Practical things.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I want to name it after you.”
I looked at him.
“Frank.”
“You can say no. It’s your name. I won’t do it if you don’t want.”
I thought about it. I looked at the maple tree, bare in January, that Danny planted the year Ruby was born.
“Name it after the note,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t name it after me. Name it something like, I don’t know. *The Pie Fund.* Something dumb. Something a kid could say without feeling weird about it. And don’t tell them where the name came from. Let them guess.”
He laughed. First real laugh I’d heard from him.
“The Pie Fund.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. The Pie Fund.”
We sat there a while longer.
“Frank,” I said. “Can I ask you something.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you regret it. That you never came back sooner. That you waited twelve years.”
He took a long time to answer.
“Some days I do,” he said. “Some days I think about all the years I could have known, and I feel sick about it. But mostly no. Because I don’t think I could have done it before. I don’t think I was a whole enough person to walk up to your door until I was.”
“That’s fair.”
“What about you. Do you wish I’d come sooner. Before the, before everything.”
I thought about it seriously. About whether I wished he’d walked up my driveway a year ago, six months ago, the week Danny died.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I could have heard it before. I think if you’d shown up while Danny was sick, or right after, I would have thought you were a scam or a hallucination or something worse. I don’t think I could have held it.”
“Yeah.”
“So maybe we both got here on time.”
“Maybe.”
He finished his coffee. He stood up. His knees cracked.
“I’m going to go, Katie.”
“Okay.”
“Can I come back.”
“Yes.”
“For dinner. Sometimes. Not, I mean, I don’t want you to think”
“Frank. Yes. For dinner. Sometimes.”
He nodded. He walked to his SUV. He turned around at the door.
“You know what I keep thinking about,” he said.
“What.”
“You wrote *whatever it is, it passes.* On the note. You didn’t know what *it* was. You just knew there was an *it* and you knew it would pass. You didn’t know me and you told me the truth of my life in one sentence.”
“I got that from my mom,” I said. “She used to say it when things were bad. *Whatever it is, it passes.* I never knew if I believed her.”
“You should,” Frank said. “It’s true. It’s the truest thing anybody ever said to me.”
He got in the SUV. He drove away.
I stood on the porch and watched his taillights until they turned at the end of the street, the same way I had in October.
The maple tree was bare. The house behind me was warm. Ruby was asleep upstairs in the room she was born in.
I went inside. I locked the door. I washed the dishes.
On the fridge, held up by a magnet shaped like a strawberry, was Ruby’s drawing. Her and me and Danny in the clouds and Frank in silver marker off to the side, a little separate but on the same page.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs.
The stair that creaks in the rain didn’t creak. It wasn’t raining.
But I knew it would, eventually. It always did.