The woman in scrubs told me the man in 2B was eighty-four, and that he did not have a lot of not-yet left, and that he had told her he knew me in 1966 and that I was the only person who ever treated him like he was worth something.
I knew who she meant before she finished. There was only one boy that could be.
In 1966 there was a young man in my town everyone had written off, poor, stammering, the kind of boy people crossed the street to avoid. I did not cross the street. I was kind to him, the way you are kind when you are young and do not yet know that kindness can change a whole life. I never thought much of it. He never forgot it. Not for fifty-eight years.
He never married. He carried a picture of me his whole life, the girl who was decent to him when no one else would be. And in his last years, alone and failing, he ended up in this town, and by a chance I still cannot fully explain, my son-in-law came to know him.
My son-in-law did not have a secret apartment for any of the reasons a suspicious woman lets herself imagine. He found a dying old man with no family and a picture of his mother-in-law on the wall, and he quietly rented him a place, and arranged his home health, and cared for a lonely stranger for three years, all because that stranger had once loved me and had nobody left.
The old man had begged, for three years, to see me one time before he died. And my son-in-law, bless him, kept saying not yet, because he did not know how to explain any of it without it sounding like exactly the thing I had feared, and he was terrified of hurting me or the old man both.
I did not wait another day. I went up to 2B, and I knocked, and an eighty-four year old man in a wheelchair looked up at me and started to cry, and said my name the way you say a prayer you have been saying for fifty-eight years.
I sat with him. I held his hand. I told him I remembered him, which I did, and that being kind to him was one of the easiest things I ever did, and I was sorry it had meant so much because it had cost me so little.
He said it had not cost me little. He said it had saved his life, that one girl being decent to him was the reason he did not give up back then, and that he had wanted, just once, to say thank you.
He passed in the winter. I was there. So was my son-in-law, the man I had wrongly suspected, who had spent three years and his own money making sure a lonely old man died cared for and got his one wish.
I feared my son-in-law was hiding something shameful. He was hiding the kindest thing I have ever known a person to do. And I got to give an old man, at the very end, the thank-you he waited a lifetime to say.