I did not make her any grand promises in that gymnasium. I have learned that grand promises are cheap and a scared young person has heard plenty of them. What I did was simpler. I said, “I’m going to be honest with you, because you were honest with me. I lost my wife three years ago and I’ve been driving around ever since like a man looking for his own grave. I don’t have anybody either. And I think maybe I stopped in this town for a reason I didn’t understand until about an hour ago.” I told her I was not asking for anything and she owed me nothing, but I said I would like to take her and her friends and whoever she had to that diner and buy the biggest graduation supper they had, and that if she was willing, I would like to stay a few days and see if there was a way I could help a young woman get to college. No strings. Just an old man who suddenly had a use for himself again.
She looked at me for a long time. She was a smart girl, and a girl who had learned the hard way to be careful, and I watched her weigh it. Then she said, “My aunt used to say God sends who He sends when you need them, and you’re not supposed to argue with Him about the paperwork.” And she laughed at her own saying, and she stuck out her hand to shake mine like we were closing a deal, and I shook it, and that handshake is the most important thing I have ever agreed to in my life.
Building Something Real
I want to be careful here, because I know how these things can sound. An old man and a girl with no family. People will imagine all sorts of things, and they will be wrong. What we built was not complicated and it was not improper and it was not, at bottom, even unusual. It was the oldest arrangement in the world. A person who needed looking after found a person who needed someone to look after. That is all a family has ever been, when you scrape away the blood and the paperwork. It is people deciding to be responsible for each other and then actually doing it, day after ordinary day, when it would be easier not to.
I stayed. I got a room at the little motel by the highway for the first while, which mattered, because I wanted everything about it to be plain and above-board, and I wanted the town to see that it was. And this is where I have to give the town its due, because a lonely girl and a stranger could have gone very differently in a place like that. But small towns, for all the things people say about them, know how to close ranks around a child, and they had a lot to answer for where Grace was concerned, and I think some of them knew it. The waitress from the diner, whose name was Carol, she took one look at the situation and appointed herself the general manager of it. She checked on Grace. She checked on me, harder. She let it be known around town what was what. The pastor who had given the invocation came by and sat with me for two hours drinking bad motel-lobby coffee and asking me plain questions, and at the end of it he shook my hand and said, “I think you’re the answer to a prayer that girl has been praying since she was six years old, and I’ve been wondering when the Lord was going to get around to it.” Having a whole town decide to trust you is a heavy and a wonderful thing. I did not take it lightly. I have not to this day.