PART 4: Be Kind to Strays
The paper inside was thin as onion skin, folded in thirds. It was my father’s handwriting, the same square pencil letters I used to find on notes stuck to the icebox: Gone fishing. Back by supper.
“Birdie, if Harold gives you this, it means I’m not coming home. Don’t be sad forever. Be a teacher. Be kind to strays. And never let anybody tell you that you can’t.”
That was all. Four lines.
I never did become a teacher. Money got tight after Dad died, and at sixteen I started waiting tables at a café in Duluth. But for thirty-four years I fed every hungry kid who walked into my diner and never charged the ones who couldn’t pay. Ed used to say I ran a school with gravy.
Be kind to strays.
I looked at the old man in the bed. I thought about the dog on my step every morning at 6:40.
I hadn’t cried in front of anyone since Ed’s funeral.
I cried in that hospital room for a long time. Harold cried too. At some point he reached over and laid his bony hand on top of mine, and neither of us spoke, because nothing needed saying.
When I finally wiped my face, he said, “He’d be proud of you, Birdie.” I let him call me that. I found I didn’t mind at all.
I drove back to Ely that night with Duchess asleep in the passenger seat, her stitched neck resting on Ed’s parka. I had forgotten all about Glen Hobart. Rudy hadn’t.
By Thursday, Rudy had told the plow drivers. The plow drivers told the gas station. Somebody’s granddaughter put it on Facebook.
The county inspector did come on Friday.
So did the local news.
And so did half of Ely. The VFW. The high school hockey team, still in their letter jackets. Mrs. Halvorsen from the library. People I hadn’t seen in years, grown men and women whose pancakes I’d cut into squares when they were five.
The line ran out the door and down the block, in fifteen-degree weather, with people stamping their boots and passing a thermos back and forth.
Duchess sat by the register on a folded blanket, stitches in her neck, wearing a new red collar the hockey team had chipped in to buy.
The inspector was a tired-looking woman with a clipboard. She looked at the line. She looked at the dog. She looked at me.
She ordered a coffee, ate a biscuit, and left without writing anything.
Around noon, Glen Hobart’s car pulled up across the street. He sat behind the wheel in his camel coat, staring at the crowd for a long minute. Then he drove away.
The VFW post voted to cover my rent increase for the next two years. “For the woman who found one of ours,” said their commander, Walt, who wears a Purple Heart pin on his ball cap.
Glen Hobart doesn’t come in anymore.
Nobody misses him.
Harold lives in the assisted living home two blocks from the diner now. His hip healed, and he gets around with a walker that has tennis balls on the feet.
Every Tuesday, Rudy drives him over. He sits in the corner booth. Black coffee. Two eggs. He still leaves a twenty. I’ve given up arguing.
Some Tuesdays his memory is sharp, and he tells me stories about my father I never knew. Other Tuesdays he calls me Birdie and asks if I’ve caught any walleye lately. Either way, I sit with him.
The photograph of the two soldiers on the sandbag wall hangs by the register now, beside Ed’s.
Duchess lives with me. She sleeps on Ed’s side of the bed.
And every morning at 6:40, she sits by the register and waits for her biscuit.
Now she eats it.
THE END.
Sometimes kindness takes fifty-eight years to come back to you. But it comes. If you were Dot, what would you have said to Harold first? Tell us in the replies.
