10 People Who Learned the Truth About a Parent, a Neighbor, or a Stranger and Saw Human Nature in a New Light

Since freshman year, my daughter Ina took the school bus alone, and the stop was right next to an auto shop that I could never see from our kitchen window, though the owner always waved when I drove past and seemed nice enough, until another man from our street caught me at the mailbox one morning and said that he kept to himself ever since his wife passed away and that I might want to think twice about letting Ina stand around there. I brought it up that night over dinner, and Ina just said “it’s fine, Mom” and kept eating, which wasn’t like her at all, so the next afternoon I left work early and followed the bus in my car, mostly because I’d been getting home after dark for months and realized I couldn’t picture that stop at all. As it turned the corner, to my horror the owner was sitting in a plastic chair outside the open garage with a mug of coffee, and Ina walked right up to him and dropped her backpack at his feet, so I pulled over so fast I scraped the curb and got out already rehearsing what I’d say. But the garage doors were wide open, there were two mechanics working on a truck behind him, and he was just asking her whether the algebra test had gone better than last week, and when he saw me coming he stood up and said, a little embarrassed, “You must be her mom, she talks about you all the time.” “Mom, don’t be mad,” Ina said, “he just keeps me company until I head home.” He explained it the way you’d mention the weather, that she was always the first one off the bus because her friends lived out past the Linden stop and stayed on, that the road from there to our house has no houses on it and gets dark early in the fall, and that since he closed up around that hour anyway he’d started sitting outside until she was on her way. What I hadn’t known was that Ina hadn’t made a single friend on that route all year, and that she’d kept quiet because she didn’t want to be one more thing I had to worry about after the divorce. I stood there with my keys in my hand, thanking him in a voice that didn’t sound like mine, and he waved it off and told me to come by for a coffee sometime if I wanted to see the shop in daylight. I did stay for a cup that afternoon, and I walked the rest of the way home with Ina without either of us saying much, and the next morning I drove past the mailbox and didn’t wave at the man who had warned me. Now I leave work early on Tuesdays and Thursdays and meet her at the stop, and on the other days I know that the plastic chair is still out there.

My mother started staying in the kitchen with her phone after dinner a few months after my father passed, smiling at it in a way I hadn’t seen in years, and when I asked who she was texting, she said, “Just a friend from physio,” and turned the screen face down, which was enough for me to go through it the next time she left it charging while she was in the shower. His name was Daniel; he was seventy-three; he’d worked as a surveyor; and they had been writing to each other every night for almost five months, mostly about nothing, what they’d had for dinner, whose knee was worse, and a long argument about whether tomatoes belong in the fridge, and somewhere in the middle of it all she had written that she still slept on her side of the bed. I put the phone back exactly where I’d found it and waited until the weekend to bring it up, and I did it badly, saying “Mamma, are you sure you know who this man is?” before she’d even sat down. She looked at me for a while and then said, “I know exactly who he is, I’ve had coffee with him eleven times, and you’d know that if you came on a Sunday instead of calling to tell me you’re busy.” I started to say I wasn’t trying to control her, and she cut me off, more tired than angry: “You don’t mind that I have someone, you mind that it isn’t your father, and so do I, Marta, every single day, but the phone doesn’t ring on its own.” I drove home without answering, and for two weeks I only sent her the usual messages about groceries until she wrote that Daniel was coming for lunch on Sunday and that I could come or not. I came with a store-bought tiramisu because I couldn’t face cooking, and he stood up when I walked in, shook my hand with both of his, and told me he’d been dreading this more than his last colonoscopy, which made my mother laugh so hard she had to put her fork down. I wouldn’t say I like him yet; he corrects the way I load the dishwasher, and he refers to my father as “your late husband” right to her face, but last Sunday she called to ask if I wanted to join them at the lake, and I said yes before I’d had time to think about it.

When I lost my twin daughters, my elderly neighbor came by during their memorial service and asked what the occasion was. He had a neurological brain disorder, but it was like he had clarity that day. He looked at me and my now deflated stomach, walked over, and gave me a tight hug. He said some really nice words and asked if he could release a (compostable before anyone comes for me) balloon for them as well. We did it all together, and we talked about a lot of things. The next day he came over with big sunflowers he dug up from his yard and planted them in front of my window with his wife. He said he wanted to make sure that I still had some ‘sunshine during these dark days.’ He would still refer to my daughters as little sunflowers; he would take care of the sunflowers for me, and even though he’s since forgotten my pregnancy, without fail every day he would come and sit on my porch giving me company. He’s wonderful. Anyway, he passed away in February of this year, and I’d like to think that he’s playing a part in taking care of them with my grandma and others.

Spring 2018. I accidentally stumbled upon a wedding dress I loved for $60 with only 3 weeks left until my wedding. I called around everywhere, and not one local business could fit me in for alterations. I was discussing this with a coworker on our hospital lunch break in a quiet area, and a nurse popped around the corner and said, “I do alterations. I’d love to look at it!” Taken aback, I ask her what she usually charges for her work. She says, “Eh, 50 dollars” (this is extremely cheap for wedding dress alterations). I accept her offer and get her number, and we arrange for me to bring it in on our lunch break the next day. She had me do several fittings, just to make sure it’s perfect. She even purchased additional material for part of it. During those times, we spoke about our lives, and she told me that her mother passed this winter. They used to sew together, and working on projects like this makes her feel close to her mom again. On the day I picked it up, she handed me the dress with a huge smile. I try to give her the money, and she won’t take it. She says it’s on her, in honor of her mother. I broke down, and we both cried together. I promised to pass on her good deed one day.

My car broke down on the interstate. I was maybe 20 years old at the time. An older gentleman pulled over to help me. It turned out that he had just gotten off work as a Santa Claus at a local mall. I don’t remember what exactly was wrong with my car, but I’m pretty sure it had overheated. He stayed with me until the engine cooled down, made sure I had coolant and oil, and gave me a few chocolate bars. He followed me off the interstate to a convenience store where I could call my dad. Cell phones were around, but not common then. I gave the guy the biggest hug. It felt like he was my guardian angel that night. Not many people would pull over to help someone broken down on the interstate, but this gentleman did. I will never forget him and his kindness.

My brother Stefano had recently lost his job so I gave him the key to my apartment for a few nights, and that was fourteen months ago. He pays no rent, he never cooks, and last month I came home from a double shift and found four of his friends on my couch playing video games, with pizza boxes stacked on the table and nobody having thought to tell me they were coming, but every time I brought it up he said, “You’re my sister, I thought family didn’t keep score.” My mother took his side and said that sending him away would be unforgivable, while my partner told me I was confusing generosity with letting myself be walked over. In the end I gave him a deadline of three months, and he took it as a betrayal: he stopped talking to me for a week, then disappeared for two days and left the key on the table. I spent those forty-eight hours convinced I had put my own brother on the street, until my mother mentioned, almost in passing, that he was sleeping at her place and that he had a job interview the next day he hadn’t told me about, so I wouldn’t feel guilty. “I didn’t want you to think I was only leaving because you pushed me,” he said when I finally called him, and I didn’t know what to answer, so I just said I was sorry for the way I’d handled it and that I’d been tired for a long time without ever saying so. He found a job a month later, and the first thing he did with his paycheck was show up at my door on a Sunday with bags of groceries, ask me to sit down, and cook dinner for the three of us, my partner included, burning the onions a little but refusing to let me help. “I should have asked you before inviting anyone over, and I should have said thank you a long time ago,” he told me while we ate, and I laughed for the first time in months and told him he could keep one thing from the old days: the spare key, as a guest this time.

When my parents retired, they announced they were selling our family home in the city and moving to a village of two hundred people. I told them it was a terrible idea, since my mother can’t drive at night and the nearest hospital is forty minutes away. They went anyway, and for the first months my mother called me every day to describe the garden, the neighbors, and the silence she’d wanted for thirty years. Then the calls shortened, and one Sunday she said the village shops closed at six and that she’d started talking to the radio. I drove out and found my father building a shed with great enthusiasm while she watched from the window, and in the car on the way home, he admitted he knew she was unhappy but couldn’t bear to be the one who said they’d made a mistake. I haven’t told her what he said. They’re still there; he’s finishing the shed, and I’m the one who now has to decide whether to say it out loud for both of them.

I was having lunch with a few co-workers. A group of aviators came in for lunch and sat at a table close to us. Several officers and a few enlisted men. When the waitress took their orders, I heard one young man order a salad and water. His captain asked if he was ordering anything else. He indicated that since he had just found out that his wife was expecting, he had to save money, and that was all he could afford. No one at his table offered to help out. We had the same waitress, so when she came over to us, I told her to give him the best meal she could think of and put it on my tab. I was amazed that his own crew did not help him out. BTW, that young man ate VERY WELL that day.

When my father remarried at seventy-one, eighteen months after my mother’s memorial, my brother and I decided not to go, because it felt like he had replaced her before the flowers had even wilted. He called three times before the ceremony, and my brother answered the last one and told him, “Do what you want, you always do.” He didn’t call again after that. For two years we heard about him only through relatives: that he and Nadia had moved to the coast, that he had stopped answering emails, and that his phone was always off. Last spring it was Nadia who called me, at six in the morning, to say he’d had a stroke and had been asking for us for two days. I drove down that same day. My father was awake and looked at me for a long time, and what he finally said was “You came,” in a tone I couldn’t read. Nadia made me coffee in a kitchen that wasn’t my mother’s, and I still don’t know whether I’m allowed to be grateful to her without betraying my mother.

My wife passed after 10 years of marriage, and while I was sorting through her things, I found a birthday card at the bottom of a shoebox, addressed to a man whom I’d never heard of. Inside, she had written, “I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise.” I almost threw it away until I noticed the date: the day our first child was born. I called the number written on the envelope that night, and when a man answered, and I told him who I was, he whispered, “She never told you, did she?” I asked what he meant, and he said that he was calling from the corridor of a care home and didn’t want to wake anyone. “I’m Elena’s father,” he said. She had always told me her father had passed away when she was nineteen, and I had never questioned it, because she hated talking about her family. He explained that he had left the family when Elena was a child and had spent years living far away, that her mother had never forgiven him and had cut him off the day he came back, and that Elena had found him again when she was twenty-two and started calling him every few months without telling anyone. “She promised me she’d bring her first baby to meet me,” he said. “I think the day Sofia was born she realized she’d have to admit she’d lied to you for years, and she couldn’t do it.” She had written the card that night, since his birthday was three days later, but never sent it, and she kept calling him twice a year from her work phone. The last time was in March, when she told him she was sick and would tell me everything once her treatment was over. After that, her number stopped answering, and he was too afraid to call mine. Sofia is eight, and she still believes her grandfather passed before she was born. I haven’t told her anything yet, but last Sunday I drove to the care home, and when I opened the door, he looked at me for a long time before asking, “Does she have her mother’s eyes?”