The Stranger She Asked

After the Caps Came Down

You know how it goes at the end. The caps go up, and there is that scramble of families onto the floor, everyone finding everyone, cameras and flowers and grandmothers being hugged half to death. I stood at the edge of it again, the way I always stood at the edge of things, except this time I was not looking for a fire to warm my hands at. I was looking for one particular face.

She found me first. She came running across that gymnasium floor in her gown with her cap in her hand, dodging families, and she ran right up and stopped short of me, suddenly shy, like she had remembered we were strangers. And I opened my arms because I did not know what else to do, and she stepped into them and hugged me hard around the middle, and I held onto a graduate’s shoulders and I told her, “You did so good. You did so, so good.”

When she stepped back she was crying and laughing both. “I heard you,” she said. “The whole place heard you. I was so scared nobody would make a sound and then you, you were louder than anybody’s whole family.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “Thank you. I don’t have a way to tell you what that. I’ve never had anybody.” She stopped. She could not finish it, and she did not have to.

I had a hundred things I wanted to say and no right to any of them. I was a stranger. My part was over. The polite thing, the correct thing, was to tell her I was proud of her one more time, and shake her hand, and walk back out to my truck and drive on to see a man about farm equipment I did not need, and let her get on with the rest of her life among people who actually belonged to her. That is what a sensible man does. He does his one kind thing and he does not overstay it.

But I stood there in that emptying gymnasium and I thought about the thing she had said. I’ve never had anybody. And I thought about my quiet house that I had sold and my quiet truck that I was living out of, and I thought, here are two people standing in the middle of a crowd who have both spent a long time being nobody’s anybody, and only a fool walks away from that twice.

So I said, “Grace, what are your plans? After today. Where do you go from here?”

And her face did that small flinch again, the one from before, and she said she did not really know. The aunt’s apartment was only hers through the end of the month. She had a job lined up at the diner, actually the same diner I had eaten in, and a spot at the community college two towns over in the fall if she could figure out the getting there and the paying for it. She said it all matter-of-fact, the way a person says hard things they have already made peace with because there was never any point in crying over them. And I realized she had a graduation and a diploma and a whole open road in front of her and not one single soul to help her walk it. It was my own situation exactly, turned inside out. She was starting a life alone. I was ending one alone. It seemed to me, standing there, that the Lord does not usually arrange a coincidence that neat by accident.