The Stranger Who Followed Us Home

Well, that got me. Out of the mouths of children. I said, Ava, I tried for years, and she said, but you did not have me helping.

So the two of us took that thermos down off the shelf and we really looked at it, the way you look at a thing when a nine year old makes you.

And Ava, with her sharp young eyes, found something I had looked past a thousand times. On the very bottom, scratched into the steel with a nail or a knife, were two letters and a number. R A and then 47.

I had seen those marks for nine years and thought they were just scratches. Ava said, Mom, those are initials. R A. That is him. And a number, maybe his mailbox.

I about sat down on my kitchen floor. Nine years and I had the man’s initials scratched on the bottom of the thing the whole time.

R A. I started going through every R A I could think of in three counties. Robert somebody. Ray somebody. I had a list going by that afternoon.

But it was Ava again who cracked it, because Ava took the thermos to school for her project and showed it to her teacher, Mrs. Lindgren.

And Mrs. Lindgren is seventy some and has lived in Hartwell her whole life, and she turned that thermos over in her hands and went very quiet.

She told Ava to have her mother call her. I called that evening, and Mrs. Lindgren said, Dana, I think that thermos belonged to Roy Albrecht.

Roy Albrecht. I had heard the name. An old farmer from out by the Sterling line, a quiet man, a widower. He had passed on, Mrs. Lindgren thought, two or three years back.

My heart went down at that. Two or three years. I had run out of time. The man I had looked for since my babies were babies was gone, and I had never shaken his hand.

But Mrs. Lindgren said, his daughter Ellen still lives out on the home place. You should go see Ellen. And then she said the thing that changed everything.

She said, Dana, you do not know the half of what that thermos means, and you did not hear it from me, but Ellen will tell you if you go gentle.

I did not sleep that night. The next morning I put the thermos in a clean dish towel like it was made of glass, and I drove out Route 9, the same road, in the kind spring sun this time.

Ellen Albrecht is about my age, maybe a few years older, a tall woman with her father’s plain kind face, and she was out setting tomato plants when I pulled in.

I had called ahead so she knew I was coming. I got out with the thermos wrapped in the towel and I could not even get my speech out before my eyes went.

I said, I think this belonged to your father. I think he gave it to me nine years ago on Route 9 in an ice storm when my babies and I would have frozen.