The Waitress Who Gave Me Her Last $12 in 1998 Just Found My Obituary Wrong

Here is what he told me, in the pastor’s office, with the door closed, and Marlene sitting in the chair by the window because I asked her to stay.

Amanda had left him a voicemail from the parking lot.

She was going to her mother’s.

She said she wanted a divorce and she wanted it in writing that she had known nothing.

Derek said, “She knew everything.”

Then he said, “That’s not fair. She didn’t know about you. She thought you were real. I told her you’d raised me and that we hadn’t spoken since a family fight but you’d left me the house in your will.”

He said the medical bills were real.

Their daughter, my great-niece I suppose, had been born with a heart condition four years ago.

Two surgeries.

One more coming.

Insurance covered some.

Not most.

The first GoFundMe, for his grandmother, had been legitimate.

It had raised more than they expected.

It had paid for the first surgery.

The second one, for his father, had been “mostly” legitimate.

His father had died.

But the money hadn’t gone to the funeral.

It had gone to the second surgery.

And this one.

This one had been a lie from the start.

He said he’d been looking at obituaries in nearby papers, looking for a name close to a relative, someone who might plausibly have died and left him something, and he had seen a woman in Rockford named Linda Whitley in an alumni newsletter, and he had realized it was me.

He said, “I thought you were probably dead already. Or you’d never see it. I thought, she doesn’t have anybody, who’s going to know.”

He said, “I know how that sounds.”

I said, “It sounds like exactly what it is.”

He said, “I know.”

I said, “How much of the money is left.”

He said, “About thirty of the forty-seven. The rest went to the surgery deposit. It’s scheduled for November.”

I asked him how much the surgery cost.

He said, “Sixty-two thousand, out of pocket, after insurance.”

I sat there for a while.

I thought about the bag of frozen peas.

I thought about a fifteen-year-old boy who didn’t say anything, just went in the kitchen and did the one thing he could do.

I thought about Marlene at twenty-two, counting ones and fives.

I thought about the woman I had been for twenty-six years, who did not owe anyone anything, and who had also not been owed anything by anyone, and how those two things had turned out to be the same lonely thing.

I said, “Derek. Look at me.”

He looked at me.

“You are going to give back every dollar of that forty-seven thousand. Every donor gets a personal letter from you. It will say you lied. It will say you are sorry. It will not make excuses about your daughter. Do you understand me?”

He nodded.

“You are going to give it back this week. If that means you sell your truck, you sell your truck. If it means you take a second job, you take one. You will do this because you were raised, partly, by a woman who taught you that when you take something that isn’t yours, you give it back.”

He was crying again.

Quietly.

“And then,” I said, “when it is all returned, and every one of those people has their money back and a letter from you in their hand, you are going to call me. And I am going to pay for your daughter’s surgery.”

He looked up.

Marlene, from the chair by the window, said very softly, “Oh, Linda.”

I said, “I have the money, Derek. I have had the money for years, sitting in a savings account I do not need, because I was too proud to spend it on anything that mattered.”

I said, “I am not doing this for you. I am doing this because a twenty-two-year-old girl in Iowa put twelve dollars on a counter in 1998 and I have been trying to figure out for twenty-six years what I owe the world because of it. And it turns out what I owe is: everything I have that I don’t need.”

Derek said, “I can’t let you do that.”

I said, “You do not get to have an opinion on that anymore, Derek. You gave up your opinion when you put my face on a marquee.”

He laughed.

That wet laugh again.

Then he said, “Aunt Linda.”

I said, “Don’t.”

He said, “I still have the book.”

I said, “What book.”

He said, “The one I came to borrow that night. I never gave it back. It’s on my shelf. It’s been on my shelf since 1998.”

I couldn’t speak for a minute.

Marlene came over and stood next to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

That was three months ago.

Derek returned all $47,000.

It took him nine weeks.

He sold the truck.

Amanda came back after seven of those weeks, once she saw he was actually doing it.

The letters he wrote were the hardest thing I have ever read, and I read all of them before he mailed them, because I did not entirely trust him yet and I told him so.

Their daughter had her surgery on November 14th.

Her name is Hope, which I know is on the nose, but her parents named her, not me.

She came through it fine.

She is four and she is loud and she does not like me yet because I am new, but she will.

I sold my house in Rockford.

There was nothing keeping me there.

I moved to Dubuque, into a little rental two blocks from Marlene’s apartment.

On Sundays we go to the Perkins off the interstate and we split a stack of pancakes and we talk for four hours.

She retired last month.

I paid off what was left of her mortgage as a retirement gift.

She cried and she yelled at me and she cried again and then she said thank you, and then she said, “You know I never expected the twelve dollars back.”

I said, “I know. That’s why you’re getting the house.”

Her grandson is at community college.

He wants to be a nurse.

I am helping with that too.

I drive to Cedar Falls once a month to see Hope.

Derek and I do not talk much when I am there.

We are polite.

He makes me coffee.

I read to his daughter.

Once, on the way out, he handed me a book.

Old paperback.

Curled at the corners.

It was the book.

From 1998.

I took it home to Dubuque.

I put it on the shelf next to a small framed napkin with a name written on it in a twenty-two-year-old’s handwriting.

I am seventy-four years old.

My obituary ran in the Cedar Falls Gazette in October, and it was wrong about almost everything.

But it did get one thing right.

I am survived by a family.

Just not the one anybody expected.