The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

“We’re not supposed to just tell people that,” the nurse said. “Privacy. But there was something about him. And he said, I’m only here a week, I’m staying up at the lake, and I’d like to spend my evenings with whoever has nobody. And I thought about Earl, who we all knew was close to the end, closer than his nephew would believe on the phone, and I thought, Lord forgive me if I’m wrong, and I told him. Room four. Earl Tolliver. And your Walt has come every single evening since. Seven o’clock sharp. Stays till eight. Reads to him. Sings to him, badly.” She smiled. “Earl can’t talk anymore. But his heart rate settles when Walt’s in the room. The monitor shows it. I’ve got twenty two years in this work and I have never seen anything like that man.”

I could not speak. She patted my arm and went back inside.

I did not go in. I did not want Walt to know I had followed him, not like this, not caught in my own suspicion. So I walked back up the county road in the dark, past the elevator, out to the lake, and I sat on the end of the dock where he had handed me coffee on the first morning, and I waited.

He came back at a quarter past eight, up the drive, hands in his pockets, head up. He saw me on the dock and he came out and sat down beside me, and for a while neither of us said anything, and the lake was black and the stars were coming out thick the way they only do out there away from every town.

“I followed you,” I said. Because I was not going to carry it. “Tonight. I followed you into town. I saw you at the care center. I saw Earl.”

He did not get angry. That is the thing about Walt Behrens I will remember until I die. A smaller man would have gotten angry, or embarrassed, or he would have made it noble and large. Walt just nodded, slow, looking out at the water.

“You thought I was up to something,” he said. It was not a question, and there was no sting in it. “A woman in your spot would be smart to think it.”

“A woman named Darlene told me you were after my money.”

He laughed at that, a real laugh, surprised out of him. “I carried the mail thirty four years, Meg. I’ve got a government pension and a paid off house and a 2009 pickup. I am not after anybody’s money.” Then the laugh went quiet. “But I owe you the rest of it. You went out in the dark and chased it down. You earned the rest of it.”

And he told me about Marion.

Marion had been sick a long time, the slow kind, and the last fourteen months she had been in a care home in Iowa, not unlike the one in Brandt’s Mill, a low brick building with a wheelchair ramp. And every evening of those fourteen months, at seven o’clock, Walt had come. He would come after he closed up the little hobby farm for the night and he would sit with her, and he would read to her, because her eyes had gone, and he would sing to her, badly, because she loved to hear it and did not care that he could not carry a tune in a bucket. Seven to eight. Every night. Fourteen months.