The Stranger Who Followed Us Home

For years nobody knew how many people that man had pulled out of ditches and jumped off and sat with and followed home. He never told. He kept it between himself and Marlene and the Lord.

Ellen said they only found out the size of it at his funeral, when stranger after stranger came through the line and said, your father stopped for me once, and told a story just like mine.

A trucker he sat with for three hours. A teenage boy he followed home. A young couple he got moving again after a flat in a whiteout. Dozens of them, over the better part of twenty winters.

And every one of them said the same thing. He would not give his name. He said the name did not matter. He said, you just get home warm, that is the whole thing.

I sat in Roy Albrecht’s kitchen and I cried for a man I had met for one hour nine years before, and for his Marlene, who did not get her old Ford coming over the rise.

Ellen reached across the table and put her hand on mine and she said, do you see what you have done. Do you see what you brought me today.

I did not. I thought I had come to give back a thermos and say a thank you nine years too late to a man who was gone.

She said, Dana, I knew my father drove those roads. I did not know who he saved. Every person who came to that funeral gave me a piece of him I did not have.

And she said, I have not had a new one in three years. I thought I had collected all the pieces of my father there were. And here you come up my drive with another one.

She said the night he stopped for me and my babies, she could even date it, because her father had come in near dawn that morning soaked and frozen and would not say where he had been.

She had scolded him for it, she said. She had said, Dad, you are going to die out there on that ice, and he had just smiled and gone to bed.

And now, nine years on, she knew. That was the night he kept a mother and a boy and a baby girl from being another car found in the morning. That was where he had been.

We went out together and stood by the tomato plants in the spring sun, and I gave Ellen back the thermos, and she pressed it right back into my hands.

She said, no. He gave it to you. It has been keeping watch over you for nine years and it is going to keep on. But you come back, she said. You come back and you bring those babies.

So I did. I brought Caleb and Ava out the next Sunday, and Ellen made a pot roast, and we sat at Roy Albrecht’s table and I told my children whose coffee had warmed them on the worst night of their lives.