The Stranger in the Next Chair
“I can’t give you his name,” Carl said. “I don’t know it, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. But a man who sits with strangers might also walk into a chapel one day. I’ve seen stranger things in this building.” He tapped the page. “Write to him here. You never know.”
I wrote that day. I wrote, “To the young man in the tan boots who held my father’s hand on April 4. My father is a hard man to thank, so I am doing it for him. He is home and the heart is good. God bless you. Julie Quigley, Carrow, Missouri.”
Then I did the same thing every time Dad had a follow-up. I drove him, because after April nobody asked whether I could, and he sat in the passenger seat with his hands folded and told me what a waste of gasoline it was. While he was in with the doctor, I walked down the hallway into the chapel and wrote in the book. Sometimes it was just, “Still grateful.” Once I told him about my mother, who had been gone six years, and I did not know why, except that he felt like a person you could tell. (Dad’s follow-ups, I would learn, never once fell on a first Thursday after that one.)
I wrote in that notebook twenty-four times in two years. I know the number because Carl kept the pages in order and, when it was all over, showed me. The twenty-fourth I wrote in the last week of February. I told the young man I would stop bothering him now. I told him Dad was well, and that a man who wanted to be left alone ought to be left alone, and that I hoped the thanks had reached him some way I could not see. Then I hung the pen back on its string.
Nothing ever came back.
Dad asked sometimes. He would say, in the car, looking out the window, “Any word from the boy?” in a voice like a man asking about the weather, and I would say no, and he would say, “Hm,” and look at the soybeans. He asked less often the second year, because he had stopped wanting to see me disappointed.
On the second Christmas, I put the young man in the Prayers of the People at Zion Lutheran, with no name, because I did not have one. “For the young man who sat with a stranger,” I said at the microphone, and Pastor Jenkins looked at me over his glasses and nodded and added it to the list.
I thought I would carry it to my grave.
The call came on a Friday in early March, a morning so ordinary that I was standing at the kitchen sink in my robe, rinsing the oatmeal pot, with the radio on to the farm report. The phone said it was the VA, and I almost did not pick up because I thought it was a billing question about Dad’s last visit.
“Julie?” said a slow, deep voice. “It’s Carl Eberly. I’m sorry to call so early.”
“Is Dad all right?” It was my reflex. It always is.
“Your dad’s fine as far as I know. This is about the book.”
I turned the faucet off. I heard none of the farm report.
“Somebody wrote under your note,” Carl said.
I put my hand on the counter.