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.”
I didn’t trust him.
I want to be honest about that. I watched him for months.
I checked Mom’s bank statements. I called her bank. I asked her if he’d ever asked for money.
“Never,” she said. “Not once. I’ve offered. He won’t take it.”
“What do you mean, you’ve offered?”
“I tried to give him twenty dollars,” Mom said. “In November. For fixing the steps. He wouldn’t take it. He said he just wanted something to do with his hands.”
She looked at me.
“I tried to give him a coat,” she said. “Your father’s old wool peacoat. It’s been in the closet for fourteen years. It’s freezing out there, Susan. He sleeps outside.”
“Did he take it?”
“He took it,” Mom said. “But he made me promise it was a loan. He said he’d give it back in the spring.”
She looked out the window.
“He gave it back in April,” she said. “Dry-cleaned.”
Then, on her eightieth birthday, he appeared with twelve dollars’ worth of yellow roses.
It was March nineteenth. A Saturday.
We were having a party. At the house on Chestnut Street. Just family. Me and Tom. Claire, home from Philadelphia. My brother, Glenn, and his wife, Patricia, and their two sons from Lititz.
Mom wanted Ethan to come.
Glenn didn’t.
“A homeless guy, Mom? At your birthday party?”
“He’s my friend, Glenn.”
“He’s a stranger. You met him in a parking lot.”
“I met your father at a church picnic,” Mom said. “That’s not much better.”
Glenn rolled his eyes.
Ethan didn’t come to the party. He said it was for family.
But at four o’clock, in the middle of cake, the doorbell rang.
I answered it.
Ethan was standing on the porch. On the steps he’d fixed. In his gray hoodie. Freshly washed. His hair was combed. He’d shaved.
He was holding a bouquet of yellow roses.
Twelve of them. Wrapped in cellophane. With a little white ribbon. From the grocery store. Still had the price tag on the plastic.
$11.99.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “I just wanted to give her these. I won’t stay.”
Mom came to the door behind me.
She saw him. She saw the roses.
She put her hand over her mouth.
“Yellow,” she whispered. “Edwin always got me yellow.”
“I know,” Ethan said. “You told me. In November. You said he got you yellow roses every birthday for forty-six years. You said nobody’s gotten you flowers since he died.”
He held them out.
“Happy birthday, Mrs. Kemper,” he said.
