The Stranger Who Followed Us Home

Ellen set down her trowel and stood up slow and looked at that thermos in my hands, and her own face came apart the way mine was coming apart.

She said, come inside. Come inside and sit down. There are some things about my dad you need to know, and I have been wanting to tell somebody for a long time.

We sat at her kitchen table, Roy Albrecht’s kitchen table, and she poured coffee, and she told me who the man was and why he was on that road.

And I am going to tell it to you the way she told it to me, because it is the part I have carried every day since, and it is too good to keep.

Roy Albrecht had been married forty seven years to a woman named Marlene. Forty seven. That was the number on the bottom of the thermos. Not a mailbox. The years of his marriage.

He scratched it there himself, Ellen said, the winter after Marlene passed, because he wanted her with him in the truck and that thermos went everywhere he went.

Marlene Albrecht died on the sixth of December, in an ice storm, on Route 9, eleven years before the night Roy stopped for me.

She had gone to town for a prescription and the roads turned while she was out, and her car went off into the ditch on that same lonely stretch.

She was not hurt in the wreck. Ellen made sure I understood that. She was not hurt. She was only stuck, and it was night, and it was cold, and her phone, like mine, had no signal out there.

And nobody stopped. Ellen said cars went by. In the morning a man found her car and Marlene had not made it through the night, alone, eleven miles from her own warm kitchen.

I had to put my face down when Ellen told me that. Because that was my night. That was exactly my night, except for one old Ford that came over the rise and slowed down.

Ellen said after they buried her mother, her father changed. He did not talk about it. Farm men of that generation do not. But he started going out driving on bad nights.

Every ice storm, every blizzard, every night the roads turned to glass, Roy Albrecht got in that old Ford with a full thermos of coffee and he drove Route 9.

He drove it slow, up and back, up and back, from the Sterling line to the Hartwell grain elevator, all night sometimes, looking for anyone stranded the way his Marlene had been stranded.

Ellen said the family worried about him out on the ice at his age. They asked him to stop. He would not stop. He said, somebody has to be on that road so it does not happen to another one.

Somebody has to be on that road. Not on this stretch, he had said to me through the window. Not tonight. I had not understood. Now I understood everything.