The Stranger at the Back of the Funeral
The Space Heater and the Lunch Pail
The next night, Lyle said, when he slipped through the side door at nine o’clock, the break room had been transformed. The old vinyl couch had been pushed against the wall and made up with two wool Army blankets and a pillow in a flowered pillowcase. A small space heater glowed orange in the corner. On the table sat a metal lunch pail.
“Your mom’s lunch pail,” Lyle said. “I didn’t know it then. It had a ham sandwich, a thermos of vegetable soup, an apple, and a big piece of apple pie in wax paper. Every night that winter, there was something in that pail. Meatloaf. Chili. Pot roast. Once there was a whole fried chicken leg and a biscuit. I used to try to guess what it would be on my way over.”
Renata pressed a hand against her mouth. She could see it so clearly: her mother at the counter every afternoon, packing a supper for a husband she believed was lying to her, and the food going instead to a hungry child in the bus barn. Her mother had cooked for that boy for an entire winter without ever knowing he existed.
“Your dad came every night after his supper,” Lyle continued. “He’d sit with me while I ate. Then he’d make me do my homework at the parts counter. He was terrible at math. Worse than me. But he’d sit there and puzzle over it with me till we got it. Then, if I was done, he’d take me out into the bays.”
Orrin Pruett had taught a twelve-year-old boy everything he knew. How to read a wiring diagram. How to bleed brake lines. How to listen to an idling diesel and hear which injector was missing. How to set a torque wrench, and why you never skipped the second pass on lug nuts. He was patient in a way that seemed to have no bottom.
“I asked him once why he was being so nice to me,” Lyle said. “He thought about it a long time. Then he said, ‘Somebody did it for me once. You don’t pay it back. You pass it on.’ I didn’t understand what he meant until I was a lot older.”
“You don’t pay it back. You pass it on.”
Renata thought about her father’s childhood, which he had never discussed. She knew only the broad outline: a hardscrabble farm in the hills, a father who drank, a mother who died young. She had never once wondered who might have helped him.
“Did he ever try to tell anyone? The school? The county?”
“He asked me. Once, around Christmas. He said, ‘Lyle, there are people whose job it is to help with this. I could talk to somebody.’ And I lost my mind. I cried and begged him not to. I said they’d take me from my mom. I made him promise. Swear on his own kids.”
Lyle looked at the ground.
“And he kept it. Even when it would have been easier not to. He kept it all the way to the end.”
By March, his mother had saved enough for a deposit on a small apartment above a hardware store. Lyle’s last night at the bus barn was the twelfth. He remembered because Orrin brought a cake, a grocery store cake with blue frosting, and had written CONGRATULATIONS across the top in squeeze-tube icing because he couldn’t think of anything else to write.
Orrin also brought two gifts. The first was a used socket set in a dented red metal case. The second was a brass key on a loop of red string.
“The side door key,” Lyle said quietly. “He said, ‘If you ever need it again, it works. Doesn’t matter what year it is.’ I carried it in my pocket for six years. I never used it. But I needed to have it. Do you understand that?”
Renata nodded. She did understand. She had held the hands of dying people who clutched house keys to homes they hadn’t seen in years.
“When I graduated, I mailed it back to him. I figured it was time somebody else had a chance with it.” He paused. “Can I ask you something, Ms. Pruett?”
“Renata.”
“Renata.” He swallowed. “Did your mother ever know?”
