Six weeks. He said the man gets out in six weeks. And then he said the name, and I knew it, because every grown up in our town knew it in 1979.
Roy Tolliver ran a trucking outfit out of St. Louis, just across the river from our town, moving stolen freight all over the Midwest. My father drove for him. One night my father saw something at the loading dock that he could not unsee, a man beaten half to death over a missing load. He went to the FBI. He testified. Tolliver went away for a long time.
But before the trial, somebody put a brick through our front window with a note tied to it. It said they knew where his kids went to school.
My father told me all of this sitting in that vinyl chair with his hands on the walker. The government offered to move him. They offered to move all of us. But my grandmother was dying, and my mother would not leave her, and she would not let us grow up looking over our shoulders.
So the two of them decided. If my father was dead, there was no reason for anyone to come after his family. The Marshals moved him to a small town in the Ozarks under a new name. My mother held a funeral. The casket was empty. I threw dirt on it.
My mother stood at that grave next to me and cried real tears for a man she knew was alive, and she did it every year on the anniversary for forty seven years.
I did not know what to feel.
I asked him why he was here now, if that man was getting out. He said because Roy Tolliver was eighty eight years old and in a prison hospital. He said the Marshals told him the danger passed a long time ago. He stayed away because my mother asked him to. But she was failing now, and he promised her in 1979 that he would come at the end. He said he was not going to break the only promise he had left.
I checked. I called the number he gave me for a retired deputy marshal in Kansas City. The man confirmed every word and said my father was one of the bravest witnesses he ever worked with.
So I walked my father down the hall to the room where my mother lay. She had not recognized me in two weeks.
He sat down next to the bed and took her hand and said her name, the way he used to say mine. She opened her eyes. She looked at him for a long time. And then she smiled and said, you are late.
He laughed. It was the laugh from my childhood. I had forgotten it was his.
She lived nine more days. He was there every one of them, from breakfast until the nurses made him leave. He told me about his life in Missouri. I told him about his grandkids.
At her funeral, there was a real casket. We stood beside it together.
He lives with me now. My son put a railing on the front steps so he can use the porch. Every evening he sits out there, and I sit with him, and we make up for lost time the only way you can. One evening at a time.