The Stranger Who Tended Roy’s Grave

He did not unwrap it yet. He sat down on the far end of the bench, left a good space between us, and said, “You won’t remember me. I rode your husband’s bus.”

I did not say a word. I did not trust myself.

“My name is Russ Voss,” he said. “Dry Fork Road. The last stop on the route, 1985. I was ten.”

The sun came over the soybeans then, all at once, and lit up the whole row of stones.

I remembered Dry Fork Road. Anybody who lived in Alder Bend then would. It was the longest gravel run in the district, fourteen miles out and fourteen miles back, and the last house on it was a gray rented place with a tin roof and a yard full of car parts. Roy drove that route for eleven years because nobody else wanted it. I remembered that Roy came home in the winters with mud to his knees and said the Voss place was the worst of it. I did not remember the name Russ.

“Roy never said a word about you,” I told him.

“No, ma’am,” Russ Voss said. “I don’t suppose he did.”

He turned the cap over in his hands. “My dad was a hard drinker. My mother had gone off when I was six. Most mornings I walked out to the road with nothing in my stomach. And the first day of fifth grade, your husband pulled that bus up to the end of that lane, and he opened the doors, and I climbed on, and he held out a sandwich in wax paper. He didn’t say anything. Just held it out. Like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.”

The air went out of me.

“Pimento cheese,” Russ said. “White bread. The crusts were cut off.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

I had cut the crusts off. For thirty-one years I had packed Roy’s lunch pail the night before, a Thermos of coffee, an apple, a slice of pie when I had one, and two sandwiches. Always two. Roy was a big man, six foot two, and I had never once questioned it. When he asked me the autumn of 1985 for a third sandwich, I had grumbled that he was going to eat us out of house and home. He had laughed and said a man gets hungry on a long route. And I had cut that third sandwich, grumbling, and put it in the pail.

“Oh, Roy,” I said, out loud, to nobody.