The Stranger in the Next Chair
“I opened the chapel at six,” he said. “I always check the book. And there it was. Your last entry, from the end of February, is on the left page, and underneath it, in blue ballpoint, somebody printed a reply. It’s dated yesterday.”
“What does it say?”
“I’d like to read it to you. But Julie, listen. I don’t want you to be alarmed. I think it’s good. I think you should sit down for this.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Sit down,” Carl said, the way he must have said it to a lot of families.
I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet. I heard Duane come down the stairs and stop at the door and not say anything.
“There are two parts,” Carl said. “The first part says, ‘Ma’am, you do not owe me a thank you. I did not do it to be thanked.'”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“The second part,” Carl said, and he took his time, and I could hear him breathing, “says, ‘Somebody sat with my granddad in this building once, and I never found out who.'”
I did not sleep the night before I met him.
Here is how it came to be. Underneath the note, Carl said, was a phone number, written small, and a line: “If your dad wants to see me, I’m there the first Thursday of every month, in the same chair. Caleb.”
I called the number from the kitchen floor. A young man answered on the second ring, with a tire machine going somewhere behind him, and said, “Tire and Alignment, this is Caleb.” I gave him my name and said I was calling about a note in a chapel, and he was quiet so long I thought the line had dropped, and then, very gently, he said, “Ma’am? Is this Mrs. Quigley?”
“How did you know?”
“The book said Carrow. And you sound like your dad did, a little.” There was a pause. “I have to be at work, but I’m off at five. Can I call you back?”
We talked for forty minutes that evening, and arranged that Dad and I would come on the first Thursday in April, and I would call the scheduler to move his checkup to match. I asked Caleb how he had known which man was Dad. He said, “I sat with a lot of guys, Mrs. Quigley. Maybe forty. I remember six. Your dad’s one of the six.”
I asked him why.
“Because he told me about the hole,” he said. “The medic. Your dad told me about the medic. And he told me not to tell anybody, so I didn’t.”
I told Dad that night, over supper, with Duane quiet at the end of the table. Dad listened to the whole thing with his fork in the air. When I finished, he set it down very carefully, put his hands flat on either side of his plate, and said, “Well.”
Nothing else, for a long while.
Then he said, “I will want a clean shirt.”
The first Thursday in April was cold and bright. We drove down in Duane’s truck, with Duane driving. Dad wore the pressed blue shirt and the good jacket and his Army cap, the faded one that says 25th Infantry Division in letters nobody has been able to read since 1990.