The Stranger Who Tended Roy’s Grave

I asked about his family. He showed me pictures on his phone. A daughter, Jenna, who was a nurse in Joplin. A son, Caleb, nineteen, learning to weld. Charlene, a round-faced woman in a pink scarf who looked like she could handle him and had. I told him he was going to bring her to dinner. I told him I would not take no. He said, “Yes, ma’am,” in the voice of a boy who had been told something that frightened him with joy.

Before he left, I made him a sack lunch.

I don’t know why. It was a foolish thing, with him a grown man and a long drive to Joplin ahead. But I stood in my kitchen and took out the bread and the wax paper and I made two pimento cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I wrapped them as tight as Roy’s. I put an apple in the sack. I put a thermos of coffee beside it.

He took it with both hands. He looked at it a long moment.

“I can’t,” he said. His voice broke clear in half. “I can’t, Mrs. Hendricks. I’ll lose it.”

“Then lose it,” I said. “I’ve got a clean handkerchief.”

And he did. A big man in my kitchen in his stocking feet with a paper sack held to his chest, crying without a sound. I put my hand on his arm. I felt it then, the whole of it, why Roy did what he did. It does not take much. You just keep holding out the sandwich.

I called Craig that night. I told him all of it, and I heard him go quiet, and then he said, “Mom. Wait. The Saturday kid. At the garage.”

“You remember?”

“I was nine. He let me hold the flashlight while he worked on the injector pump. Dad said, this is Russ, he’s a good mechanic, you listen to him.” Craig laughed, and his voice wasn’t steady. “I thought he was just a big kid. I never knew.”

“None of us did.”

“That’s Dad,” Craig said.

“That’s Dad.”

They came on the second Sunday of October, Russ and Charlene, in a clean pickup with a pie on the seat. Charlene brought a store-bought pecan and apologized for it. I told her a pie is a pie. We ate pot roast at my kitchen table with the extra leaf in, and Craig drove down from Springfield and sat across from Russ, and the two of them talked about injector pumps for an hour while Charlene and I did the dishes and traded the kind of looks two women trade when the men are being sweet and don’t know it.