Then a young man came across the parking lot.
Tall. Thin. Dark hair that needed cutting. A gray hoodie with a hole in the elbow. Jeans with mud on the knees. A green backpack.
He knelt down on the wet asphalt without saying a word.
He picked up the tea bags. One by one. He fished the milk out from under the car. He found her pill bottle in the puddle and wiped it on his hoodie.
He looked at the cracked eggs.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “These are done for.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Mom said.
He stood up. He looked at the broken bag.
“Where do you live, ma’am?”
“Chestnut Street. Just up the way.”
He took off his backpack. He unzipped it. He put her milk and her bread and her tea and her coffee and her pills inside. On top of his own things.
He zipped it closed. He put it back on.
“I’ll walk you home,” he said.
She told me about it that night on the phone.
“Susan, he was the nicest young man.”
“Mom. You let a stranger walk you home?”
“He carried my groceries. Six blocks. In the rain.”
“Did you let him in the house?”
“Of course I let him in the house. He was soaking wet. I made him tea.”
“Mom.”
“His name is Ethan,” Mom said. “He’s twenty-four. He’s very polite. He said ma’am. Nobody says ma’amanymore.”
“Mom, he could’ve robbed you.”
“He could have,” Mom said. “He didn’t. He drank his tea and washed his own cup and thanked me and left.” She paused. “He’s homeless, Susan.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He sleeps behind that old bookstore on Queen Street,” she said. “The one that closed. He told me. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He just said it like it was the weather.”
After that, he started visiting every Thursday.
I don’t know how it started. Mom said she invited him back. Ethan said she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Every Thursday at two o’clock, he knocked on her front door.
He carried her groceries.
They’d walk to the CVS together. Or the Giant on Harrisburg Pike. He’d push the cart. She’d tell him what to get. He’d carry everything home in his backpack and two canvas bags.
He fixed her broken porch steps.
The bottom two had been rotting for three years. I’d been meaning to call somebody. Tom had been meaning to look at them. Glenn, my brother, who lives twenty minutes away in Lititz and owns a construction company, had said he’d get to it for two summers.
Ethan fixed them.
He found some old lumber in my father’s garage. He borrowed my father’s tools. The ones Mom had kept in the garage for fourteen years, hanging on the pegboard exactly where Dad left them.
He measured. He cut. He replaced both steps. He sanded them and painted them white to match.
It took him three Thursdays.
When he was done, Mom sat on the bottom step and cried.
“Edwin used to say he’d fix these,” she said. “He said it every spring for ten years.”
And he listened to stories about my late father.
That’s what Mom liked most. I could tell.
She’d make tea. They’d sit at the kitchen table. And she’d talk.
About Dad. About how they met at a church picnic in 1963. About how he proposed in a canoe on the Conestoga River and almost tipped them both into the water. About his tomatoes. About the time he drove all the way to Pittsburgh in a snowstorm because I’d called crying from college.
Ethan listened.
Mom said he listened better than anybody she’d ever known. He asked questions. He remembered things from the week before. He’d say, Wait, is this the canoe story? Tell me again about the canoe.
“He’s a good listener, Susan,” she said. “Do you know how rare that is? At my age? Everybody’s in a hurry. Everybody’s looking at their phones. He just sits there and listens. Like it matters.”
I met him for the first time in December.
I came over on a Thursday. Unannounced. On purpose.
I wanted to see this man who was spending every Thursday with my eighty-year-old mother. I’d read the articles. About scammers. About people who target lonely widows. About bank accounts emptied and houses signed away.
I walked in through the kitchen door without knocking.
He was standing at the sink. Washing dishes. In a gray hoodie with the hole in the elbow. His sleeves pushed up.
Mom was sitting at the table with her tea.
He turned around.
He was younger than I expected. He looked younger than twenty-four. Thin. Too thin. Pale. Dark circles under his eyes. A small scar through his left eyebrow.
And his eyes.
Brown. Deep-set. Something in them I couldn’t place. Something familiar.
I didn’t think about it then.
I would later.
“You must be Susan,” he said.
He dried his hands on a dish towel. He held one out.
“Ethan,” he said. “Your mom talks about you all the time.”
I shook his hand. It was rough. Callused.
“Does she,” I said.
“She says you’re the smart one,” Ethan said. “She says you read every book in the Lancaster County Library before you were fifteen.”
Mom laughed.
“Every one in the children’s section,” she corrected. “She started on the adult books at fourteen.”
I didn’t smile.
“What do you want from my mother?” I asked.
The kitchen went quiet.
Mom set her teacup down.
“Susan,” she said.
Ethan didn’t look offended. He looked at me for a long moment. Like he was deciding something.
“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t want anything from her.”
“Then why are you here every Thursday?”
He glanced at Mom. Then back at me.
“Because she asked me to come back,” he said. “And nobody’s asked me to come back to anything in a long time.”
