The Trucker I Fed for Free in 2011 Just Handed Me the Deed to My Diner

Part 3: The Thing That Was Bothering Me

I gave myself three days before I called anybody.

I did call Sharon back that afternoon, and I told her I was going to have the full amount to her by the end of the month. She was quiet for a long beat and then she said, “Dana, honey, are you okay? Where’s it coming from?”

“An old customer,” I said.

She was quiet even longer. Then she said, “Please be careful.”

I hung up and I sat with that.

Because here’s what was bothering me.

I did remember the storm in 2011. I remembered a lot of men that week. I did not remember Hollis Bremer specifically, but I remembered the sentence, and I remembered saying it to somebody who cried into his hashbrowns. But I also remembered, plain as day, that the man I said it to that week was a Black man in his fifties with a Falcons cap. Not a white man with a red beard.

I’d said the sentence a lot of times. Maybe six, maybe more. It was possible I’d said it to Hollis too. It was possible he was one of the ones I didn’t remember.

But it was also possible he’d heard the story from somebody, or read it somewhere, and used it.

Two hundred and forty-one thousand dollars is a lot of money for a story I couldn’t verify.

So on the third day, I drove to Newton and I sat in the parking lot of the law office on the front of that bank statement, and I looked at it a long time before I went in.

The lawyer’s name was Peter Ostrowski. He was younger than I expected. Maybe forty. He shook my hand and brought me back to a small office with a window that looked out on a parking lot and a Dollar General.

“Mrs. Coyle,” he said. “Mr. Bremer told me you might come by. I have to be honest with you, he said you’d come alone and he said you’d be suspicious. He asked me to answer any question you had.”

“Any question.”

“His words. Any question.”

I sat down.

“How long have you represented him?”

“Fourteen years. Since he sold the trucks.”

“Has this account existed the whole time?”

He opened a folder. Turned it toward me. Bank records going back to 2014. A deposit of forty-eight thousand dollars in June of that year. Then quarterly deposits. Then annual interest. The line labeled BENEFICIARY was blank until three months ago, when it had been updated to my name.

“Why was it blank until three months ago?”

“He didn’t know your legal name until then. He’d found you, but he wanted to be sure. He hired a private investigator to confirm you were the same person. He didn’t want to leave the money to the wrong Dana.”

“How did he confirm it?”

Peter hesitated.

“He asked me if I really wanted to answer this. I told him yes.”

Peter turned another page.

“The investigator interviewed your father’s former dispatcher. A man named Guillermo Reyes in Elko, Nevada.”

My father’s dispatcher. I hadn’t heard that name in twenty-five years.

“Guillermo remembered your father. Confirmed the story about the waitress in Elko. He’d read the letter she wrote you, back in ’98. You’d shown it to him at your father’s memorial.”

I had. I’d forgotten. But I had.

“Mr. Bremer wanted to make sure the sentence you said to him was a real sentence out of a real life. He said if it wasn’t, if you’d made it up on the spot to be kind to a stranger, that would be even more impressive. But he wanted to know.”

I sat back in that chair.

“Mr. Ostrowski.”

“Peter, please.”

“Peter. Is Hollis Bremer a real person? Is he who he says he is? Is this money real?”

Peter looked at me for a long moment.

“He’s my client. Yes, he’s real. Yes, he owned Bremer Logistics out of Omaha, sold it in 2014 for a little under three million. Yes, this money is real. Yes, his wife Ellen died on March 14th, 2011, of complications from ovarian cancer at St. Luke’s in Cedar Rapids. His brother Raymond Bremer died in September of 2013. All matters of public record. I can print obituaries for you if it would help.”

“Does he have kids?”

“No.”

“Anybody who’s going to come out of the woodwork and sue me for this money in a year?”

“No living relatives. His will is settled. This transfer is separate from the estate and won’t be contested. I made sure.”

I stared at him.

“Why me?”

Peter smiled. It was a very small smile.

“Mrs. Coyle, I’ve been asking him that for six years. He always gives me some version of the same answer. Somebody was kind to him when he had nothing. He wanted to be able to be that person for somebody else, and he wanted it to be the same somebody, so it made a circle.”

Peter closed the folder.

“He’s not doing it to feel good. He told me once he doesn’t feel particularly good about it. He said it’s just a bill he’s been trying to pay for twelve years.”

I thought about that.

I thought about a lot of things.

Then I said, “I want to sign the papers.”

Peter nodded and stood up to go get them.

At the door he stopped.

“He also asked me to tell you, if you asked why him and not somebody else who fed him along the road, and I think you did just ask that in a roundabout way,”

“I did.”

“He said, none of the others ever mentioned their fathers.”

Peter left to get the papers.

I sat there in that little office and I put my face in my hands, and I let myself feel it.

I signed everything an hour later. I drove back to Grinnell. I stopped at the bank and put in a call to Sharon and told her I’d be in Friday with a cashier’s check.

She said, “Dana.”

I said, “Sharon.”

She said, “I’m real glad.”

I said, “Me too.”

I drove back to the diner. It was three-thirty. The afternoon lull. Marisol was working the counter and she looked at me and she said, “Girl. Where have you been. You look like you saw God.”

“Something like that,” I said.

I tied my apron on and I went back to work.

I didn’t call Hollis for another six weeks.

There was a reason.

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