The Waitress Who Slipped Me a Twenty in 1997 Just Received the Deed to My Farm

I told Ed I didn’t know her, not really. I only knew what the investigator had put in his report.

Ruth Corliss’s daughter was named Diane. She was fifty-eight years old. She lived in a suburb of Chicago called Naperville. She was a nurse.

That was all I had.

Ed sat there holding the paper like it might catch fire.

“Tom,” he said, and it was the first time he’d used my first name in twenty years of doing my legal work, “Diane Corliss is the nurse who treated my wife.”

I didn’t understand.

“Marilyn,” he said. “Two years ago. Stage four. We drove to Chicago for a clinical trial at Northwestern. Diane was the one who ran her infusions. She sat with Marilyn for six hours at a stretch. She held her hand when the port went in. She called me at home to check on her on her days off.”

His voice broke.

“She was the reason my wife had eight good months instead of two.”

I could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the office. I could hear the radiator.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“It makes perfect sense,” Ed said. “It’s the smallest world you can imagine, Tom. It’s a small world and it’s a small state and this is how the whole thing works if you sit still long enough to see it.”

He set the paper down.

“You want to leave your farm to my wife’s nurse.”

“I want to leave my farm to Ruth Corliss’s daughter. That she happens to be your wife’s nurse is just.”

I couldn’t finish.

“Providence,” Ed said.

“I was going to say coincidence.”

“I know you were.”

We sat there for a while, two old men in a paneled office in Cedar Rapids, and neither of us said anything.

Finally Ed cleared his throat. “Do you want to meet her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have time. The doctor said months, not weeks. You could drive to Naperville.”

“And say what? Hello, I’m dying, and I’m leaving you four hundred acres because your mother gave me thirty dollars once?”

“You could say that. It’s true.”

“She’ll think I’m crazy.”

“She might. Or she might not.”

I looked out the window. Cedar Rapids in late November, the sky the color of a nickel, the last leaves off the maples on the courthouse lawn.

“Ed. Did Marilyn ever talk about her? About Diane?”

He smiled the smallest smile.

“All the time. She said Diane was the kindest person she’d ever met. She said Diane had this way of walking into a room where a person was scared and just, just being with them. Not fixing anything. Just being there.”

“Sounds like her mother.”

“I imagine it does.”

—

I drove to Naperville the next week.

I didn’t tell Diane I was coming. I didn’t call. I got in my truck and I drove five hours east across Illinois with the folder on the passenger seat and a heart that felt like a fist.

I stopped for gas outside DeKalb and I almost turned around.

What was I doing? A dying man showing up at a stranger’s door with a deed to a farm. She would think it was a scam. She would think I was senile. She would call her husband and her husband would call the police and I would end up explaining myself to a Naperville patrol officer in a Walgreens parking lot.

I sat in the truck at the pump for ten minutes.

Then I thought about Ruth. About the way she folded those bills into my hand. Two twenty and a ten. About her voice when she said “you call your mama.” About the fact that she had probably done this a hundred times in her life for a hundred lost boys and never expected a single one of them to come back.

I put the truck in drive.

Diane’s house was a small brick ranch on a street of small brick ranches. There was a maple in the front yard and a plastic pumpkin on the porch left over from Halloween. A silver Camry in the driveway. Christmas lights already strung along the gutters but not turned on yet.

I sat at the curb for a long time before I got out.

I rang the bell and I heard a dog bark and then footsteps and then the door opened.

She was tall. Taller than I expected. Gray hair cut short around a kind, tired face. Reading glasses pushed up on her head. She was wearing scrubs with cartoon snowmen on them.

“Can I help you?”

“Are you Diane Corliss?”

“Diane Kowalski, now. Corliss was my maiden name. Who’s asking?”

“My name is Tom Halloran. I’m from Iowa. Your mother, in 1997, your mother did something for me and I.”

I couldn’t get the rest out.

She looked at me. Really looked. And whatever she saw in my face made her step back and open the door wider.

“Come inside,” she said. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”