The Stranger in the Next Chair
He told me how he had come to see my note, too, because I had been wondering for two years. Before he left the hospital on every first Thursday, he walked down to the chapel and wrote his granddad a line in the prayer book. Just a line. “Sat with a man today.” He had never read anyone else’s pages. “It felt like opening somebody’s mail,” he said. But I wrote on the other Thursdays, so my notes always landed pages away from his. That month the book was nearly full, and the only blank page left was the one right under mine. “And the first words were ‘To the young man in the tan boots,'” Caleb said. “I read the whole thing standing up. I had to.”
I will tell you what I said, and it was not much. I said, “Caleb, I’m so sorry about your grandfather,” and he said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and I said, “I mean it,” and he said, “I know you do.”
Then I did the thing Duane had told me, two years earlier, not to do. I tried to say thank you.
“I don’t want to be thanked,” Caleb said, almost sharply. He closed his mouth, and tried again more gently. “Ma’am. I’m sorry. It’s just that nobody ever got to thank the man who sat with Granddad. And that’s okay. Somebody sat with him, and now I sit with somebody. It doesn’t have to come back around.”
“But it came back to us,” I said.
“No, ma’am.” He shook his head. “I sat with your dad because I wanted to. And he gave me more than I gave him.”
“What did he give you?”
Caleb thought about it. Duane shifted in his seat.
“He told me about the medic,” Caleb said. “The one in the hole in Cu Chi. He told me that the medic said, ‘You don’t have to be brave in here,’ and that it was the first time anybody had said it. And I realized I’d said the exact same words to him without knowing it. Because my granddad used to say them to me.”
“Why did you leave?” I asked. It was the question that had been under all the others. “When Harvey said I was parking. Why not wait?”
“Because that’s the rule,” he said. “I made it for myself. The chair’s for whoever’s alone. When family walks in, my seat’s done.” He turned the ball cap over in his hands. “It’s not about me. It’s his daughter. I didn’t want to be in the way of that.”
I laughed, once, a sound that surprised all three of us, and Duane, who is not a man for touching in public, put his big hand flat on the middle of my back and kept it there.
Dad came out of the doctor’s office an hour later with a clean report. Dr. Haddad said the stent was perfect and that he should cut the sausage. Dad said he would think about it.
He stopped at the waiting room door. Caleb stood up.
“Son,” Dad said. “I’d like to say a thing.”
“You don’t have to, sir.”
“I know that. That’s why I’m going to.” Dad took his cap off. “I have been shot at, and I’ve been cold, and I’ve buried a wife. I have never once told anybody I was scared. I told you in the first ten minutes, without a word. That’s the finest thing anyone has done for me since a boy named Alvarez, who was a medic, and who I have not seen since the sixth of February, 1968.”