The woman in the photograph, standing in front of my house with her arm around a skinny teenage boy, was Irene Kupchak, the sister of my late husband Eddie, and the man at her side was her husband, Stan. I had met them only twice in my life. Irene had been disowned at our wedding in 1976 for a quarrel nobody could even remember. I stood in my cellar in my bathrobe with the police officer holding the notebook, and my knees nearly gave out, because I knew at once who the boy in the photograph was.
“Peter,” I said. It came out like a breath. The officer looked at me. I said that the nephew of Eddie, the son of Irene, had been a skinny boy of fifteen in the 1980s, and that he had last been seen at the funeral of Eddie in 2019, standing at the back in a gray coat, a man in his fifties with a worn face. I had not spoken to him. I had not known how. The officer looked at the air mattress and the neat stack of pizza boxes. “Mrs. Kupchak, you may want to sit down,” he said.
I sat on the bottom step. The other officer went outside to look around. In the chill and dim of the cellar, I looked at the little camp where somebody had made his bed beside the old workbench of Eddie and the furnace, and I understood that whoever lived here had not meant me any harm. The blankets were folded. A pair of boots sat side by side. On the workbench, beside the notebook, lay a small wooden box of the tools of Eddie, carefully cleaned and oiled.
The most frightening visitor in the cellar can turn out to be a lonely man who only wanted to be near someone who remembered his uncle.
He came back that night, as they had thought he might. Two officers waited in the shadows behind the house with me watching from the kitchen window in my robe. At nine o clock, a thin figure in a gray coat came up the hill with a pizza box in his hands and slipped to the cellar door under the porch. He stopped. He had seen the police car, parked where he could not miss it. For a moment he stood still in the porch light, a middle aged man holding a large pepperoni.
I opened the back door. I do not know what came over me. I walked out onto the porch in my slippers, and I said, “Peter Kupchak, come inside and eat that where it is warm.” He looked up at me with the eyes of Eddie, wide and terrified, and for a moment I thought he would run. Then his shoulders dropped. He said, “Aunt Marian, I am so sorry,” and he began to cry, standing in the cold with the pizza steaming in his hands.
His story took until midnight. After his mother died, he had gone through a bad divorce, lost his job in Pittsburgh, and spent two years living in his car. In August, he had driven into Johnstown, hoping to find a way to say thank you to Eddie, who had once given him five hundred dollars and a bus ticket when he was nineteen and in trouble.
He had found the cellar door unlocked, remembered the workbench, and stayed. He had written down my schedule, he said, because he wanted to be sure I was safe.
“I was going to tell you,” he said. “I tried every night. I stood outside the kitchen door with my hand up to knock. But I thought, she will call the police, and who could blame her?” I said that I had called them already. We both laughed, suddenly, helplessly. The officers, who were not hard men, looked at one another and quietly decided that no one would be arrested that night. One of them said to Peter, gruffly, that he should find a better way to say hello.
He stayed in the spare room upstairs that winter. I put him to work on the old furnace, then the flooding in the spring, and then, as the weather warmed, the porch. He had the hands of Eddie and the slow whistle of Eddie, and I found I did not mind the house being full again. The county helped him find a job at the lumberyard in Westmont. A social worker found him a small apartment by the river. The day he moved, he carried his box of tools out to the truck like a man carrying a flag.
On Saturday nights now, he comes to supper. He rings the front doorbell, a thing he insists on, and he brings a pizza, a large pepperoni, the same one every week. I put it on the good plates. We eat it at the kitchen table, under the light, the nephew of my husband and I, and sometimes we leave one slice on the counter, by the cellar door, with a small light on, for the memory of a man who would have laughed.