The Stranger Who Tended Roy’s Grave

He held it out across the space between us. “Before I say the rest, Mrs. Hendricks,” he said, “would you please look inside the collar?”

I turned it back myself, and held it toward the light.

Inside, on the white tag, in black laundry marker, was a name I had written in the fall of 1979, in block capitals, because the church men’s supper always mixed up the coats. R. Hendricks.

I put out my hand. I did not feel my hand move. I touched the tag with one finger, and it was my own handwriting, and I could see my kitchen in 1979 and the Formica table and Roy in his stocking feet making fun of how big I wrote.

I cried then. I am seventy years old and I do not cry in front of people, but I did. I cried for the sandwiches and the cold bus and the coat my husband gave away without a word to me and then let me scold him about. I cried because he let me be wrong about him for forty years, and it did not cost him a thing to let me, and it made my heart ache that he was that kind of man and I had not known how far down it went.

Russ Voss sat there quietly. He did not try to comfort me. He didn’t say there, there. He just stayed on the end of that cold bench with a coat across his knees and waited like a man who had been taught how by somebody who knew.

When I had wiped my face with the handkerchief I keep in my sleeve, I said, “That was not all of it. There’s more.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded. “That was the easy part.”

Over the next two years, he said, Roy had done what you would call small things. He drove Russ home from school when he missed the late bus, even though it was ten miles out of his way. He gave him a pair of work gloves. When Russ was fourteen and had been caught shoplifting a candy bar at the Casey’s out on the highway, Roy was the one the store manager called, and Roy came and stood in that doorway in his bus uniform, and he told the manager he would take care of it. He did. The boy worked it off sweeping the district bus garage on Saturdays, forty dollars and a lesson in how to change the oil on a diesel.

“Saturdays,” I said. “I remember Saturdays. He said he had a boy helping him sweep.”

“I was that boy.”