His daughter sold his house for $191,000 while he was in rehab for a hip, then told his whole church he was confused, so the only people who sat with him that Thursday were six bikers who’d stopped for air. “He just likes an audience,” she yelled out her car window. She had no idea which one of us he used to drive home.
We’d pulled into the Sheetz on Peach Street in Erie because Jakub’s back tire was soft.
He was on an upturned milk crate next to the air pump.
Gray work jacket done up to the chin. A green thermos between his shoes.
The sign was the flap of a cereal box, propped against the thermos, written in black marker.
NO MONEY. JUST COMPANY.
Somebody had left a dollar on the crate anyway.
He’d tucked it under the thermos so the wind wouldn’t take it, like he planned on giving it back.
A woman in scrubs read the sign, said “God bless,” and went inside for her coffee.
Two teenagers took a picture of it and laughed.
Jakub was still on his knees with the hose.
I looked at Deepak. Deepak looked at the curb.
Then all six of us were sitting on it.
He didn’t talk at first. He looked at our boots, one pair at a time, like he was counting them.
Kelsey kept scraping a wad of gum off her heel on the edge of the concrete. She never did get it off.
“How long you been out here?” I said.
“Since one.”
“Today?”
“Thursdays,” he said. “Since April.”
That’s twenty-eight Thursdays. I did the math that night. He’d already done it.
His name was Horace. Eighty-four.
He wasn’t broke, he said, before any of us could ask. He had a pension and a little apartment at the senior place behind the car wash, and he left the bedroom TV on so the kitchen didn’t sound so empty.
“Groceries come to the door,” he said. “The fella sets them on the mat and runs.”
“What about church?” Deepak said.
He laughed once, short.
“Church thinks I’m confused. Caroline told them I’m confused.”
Then he reached into his jacket and came out with a butterscotch.
He held it toward me, and before he let go he pinched both ends of the wrapper and twisted them opposite ways, so it would open easy.
My hands went cold.
One man did that.
Bus 41. The afternoon route out past the tracks.
I was eight. My mom worked doubles at the plastics plant, and one February she didn’t come home, and the key wasn’t under the brick.
The driver didn’t leave me at a dark house.
He kept me on. He drove the whole route twice with me in the front seat, then the late run, then bought me a cheeseburger with his own money and sat on my front steps in the cold until her headlights came up the street at nine-forty.
He never called anybody. Never told the school.
Next morning he just said, “Seatbelt, Short Stack,” like it was any other day.
I hadn’t thought about him in thirty years.
“Mr. K,” I said.
He turned his whole head.
“Bus 41,” I said. “You did the candy like that so we wouldn’t fight the wrapper.”
He looked at me for a long while. Then he put his hand flat on my knee.
“Murphy,” he said. “You were the little one.”
A silver SUV came through the lot slow. The window came down.
A woman in her fifties, sunglasses pushed up in her hair.
“Dad, are you serious right now?”
She didn’t stop. She went around the pumps and out the other side.
“That’s Caroline,” Horace said.
She came back eight minutes later. Slower.
“He’s FINE,” she yelled at us. “He just likes an audience.”
Window up. Gone again.
Horace opened his jacket an inch and took out an envelope folded in thirds, soft as cloth from being carried.
“She sold the house while I was in rehab for my hip,” he said. “I never signed a thing.”
“Then whose name is on it?” Kelsey said.
“Mine.” He tapped the envelope. “Not my hand, though. I bring this every Thursday. Nobody’s ever asked to look.”
The third time, she pulled in.
Parked across two spaces and got out with her keys still in her fist.
“Dad. Get in the car. You’re embarrassing me in front of whoever these people are.”
“They asked,” Horace said.
“Asked what?”
He held up the envelope.
Her face barely moved. Her mouth went flat and her hand came out, palm up, like he was holding something he wasn’t allowed to have.
“Give me that. You don’t even know what that is.”
“I know what my name looks like,” Horace said. “THAT ISN’T MY NAME.”
I stood up.
“You drove past him THREE TIMES,” I said. “He sat on my steps in February so I wouldn’t be alone, and you can’t stop the car.”
Caroline looked at me like something on her shoe.
“This is a family matter. Take your little gang and get off my father’s sidewalk.”
“It’s a gas station,” Kelsey said.
Caroline grabbed the envelope.
Horace didn’t let go. Neither did she.
Then Jakub got up off the concrete by the air hose, his phone still in his hand.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I’ve been filming since your second lap.”
Caroline let go.
She took out her own phone, and she was smiling when she dialed.
“Yes, hi,” she said. “My father’s being harassed by a motorcycle gang at the gas station, and he’s not competent to speak for himself.”
Eleven minutes
The cruiser came in off Peach Street eleven minutes later. No lights, no siren. It parked nose to nose with Jakub’s bike, right over the air hose.
One officer. A woman about my age with a gray streak in her ponytail and a name bar that said PETTIT.
Caroline was at the driver’s window before the door was open.
I didn’t move. Six people in leather standing up all at once looks like one thing to a cop, and it isn’t company.
“Everybody stay where you are,” I said to the curb. “Jakub, keep it running.”
Jakub kept it running.
Horace hadn’t stood up either. He’d put the envelope back inside his jacket and zipped the jacket one more inch, so it was under his chin now, and he was unwrapping a butterscotch for himself.
He wasn’t looking at the cruiser. He was looking past it, across Peach Street, at the bank on the corner. The sign out front said 2:16 and 51 degrees.
Officer Pettit listened to Caroline for a full minute without saying a word. Then she walked over and crouched in front of the milk crate so her face was level with his.
“Sir. Can you tell me your name?”
“Horace Stanley Kubiak.”
“Do you know where you are, Mr. Kubiak?”
“Sheetz,” he said. “The air pump. They charge two dollars for it now. Used to be free.”
Pettit almost smiled. Then she looked up at the six of us lined along the curb, and at the cereal-box flap, and back at him.
“Do you know these people?”
Horace turned the butterscotch over in his fingers.
“One of them,” he said.
The bank on the corner
He picked me. He put his finger out and picked me, the way he used to pick who sat up front when somebody threw up on the back seat.
And I hadn’t been on that bus since the spring of 1989.
Three years I rode it. Second grade through fourth. Bus 41 left Pfeiffer-Burleigh at 3:05 and went east past the tracks, and I was the last stop because we lived the farthest out, in the half of a double on a street with no sidewalk.
The bus smelled like wet mittens and diesel. There was a crack in the windshield shaped like Florida that he never got fixed.
He kept the butterscotch in a coffee can under his seat. You didn’t get one for being good. You got one for getting off at your stop without making him say your name twice.
He kept a list on a clipboard of everybody’s stop and everybody’s name. Thirty-one kids. He didn’t need the clipboard. He’d go down it out loud on the first day of school, and after that he never looked at it again.
I was Short Stack because I had to climb the steps with both hands.
There was a girl who rode that first year, in the very back, who never took a candy. She sat with her coat on and her backpack on and looked out the window at everything we passed like it had done something to her.
I didn’t know her name. I was eight. She was a high school kid on a grade school bus, and that was strange enough that I remembered the coat.
“She never liked the bus,” Horace said now, to the officer, about nothing she’d asked.
Pettit stood up. Her knees cracked.
“Ma’am,” she said to Caroline. “Your father appears to know where he is and who he’s with.”
“He knows where he is today,” Caroline said. “Ask him what he had for breakfast. Ask him what year it is. Ask him why he sits outside a gas station in October like somebody’s dog.”
Pettit didn’t ask him any of those.
“Dad,” Caroline said. “Tell her about the stove.”
Power of attorney
Horace’s mouth went small.
“There was a pan,” he said.
“There was a FIRE,” Caroline said. “In March. On his stove. The fire department came. He had a pan of grease on high and went to lie down. That’s in a report. You can look it up.”
Nobody on the curb said anything. Deepak looked at his boots.
That was the first time any of it sounded like her side.
Caroline heard it too. She went to her car and came back with a manila folder, the expandable kind with a flap, and she opened it on the hood of the cruiser like a lawyer on television.
“I have power of attorney,” she said. “Durable. Signed and notarized. I make his financial decisions and his medical decisions, and I decided he can’t live alone in a two-story house with a broken hip and a gas stove. That’s not a crime. That’s my job.”
Pettit read the top page. She read it longer than I thought she would.
I was close enough to see a date. I stepped closer to make sure.
March 14.
“When was your hip?” I said to Horace.
“March thirteenth,” he said. “They did it the same night. I was at Saint Vincent.”
Pettit looked at the page again. She didn’t say anything. She turned it over, looked at the back, turned it face up.
“He was conscious,” Caroline said. “He was talking. The nurses will tell you he was talking.”
“I don’t remember signing a paper,” Horace said.
“Because you don’t REMEMBER anything, Dad. That’s the whole point.”
I tried. I want that on the record. I said, “Officer, he’s got the sale papers right there in his jacket, if you just look at the signature on them next to that one…”
Pettit held up a hand.
“Sir. I’m not a handwriting expert, and I’m not a judge. I don’t rule on deeds in a gas station parking lot.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said.
“What I’m here for,” Pettit said, “is whether this gentleman is safe, and whether he wants to go with his daughter.”
Caroline closed the folder and smiled at me.
“Well, he’s not safe sitting on a milk crate with a bunch of strangers who think he’s a project,” she said. “Are you, Dad?”
Horace didn’t answer her. He was looking across the street again.
The sign out front of the bank said 2:24.
“She’s late in,” he said. “She’s usually out by now.”
2:24
“Who is?” Pettit said.
Horace nodded at Caroline without looking at her.
“Thursdays at two she does her banking,” he said. “Every Thursday. She’s done it since she was at the electric company. She parks in the back and goes in the side, and when she comes out she makes the left onto Peach, and the light is long, and she has to sit right there.”
He pointed at the lane by the curb, the one in front of the pumps. A minivan was sitting at the red light that second, blinker going.
“Right there,” he said. “Every Thursday.”
Kelsey stopped scraping her heel.
I looked at the sign. I looked at the light. I looked at the milk crate, which wasn’t by the door, where the coffee drinkers would see it, and wasn’t by the ice machine, where there was shade.
It was by the air pump. The air pump was the closest piece of Sheetz to that red light.
“You sit here so she has to see you,” I said.
“I sit here,” Horace said, “so somebody else will.”
He unzipped his jacket the inch and took the envelope back out and held it on his knee.
“I went to the church first,” he said. “Pastor said Caroline told him I was having episodes. I went to the bank and they said she has the paper. I called the man who bought the house and he hung up. I called a lawyer out of the phone book and he wanted four thousand dollars to look at it.”
He tapped the envelope.
“So I figured. Some Thursday a person sits down. Not to give me a dollar. Sits down. And they’re sitting there when she goes by. Then there’s somebody who saw.”
The light turned. The minivan made the left.
“I wrote the sign so nobody’d think I wanted money,” he said. “The money was never going to help.”
He reached under the thermos and slid the dollar out and held it up.
“Who left this?”
Nobody on the curb had. He shook his head and put it back.
Pettit had her notebook out. She hadn’t written anything yet, but she had it out.
“Mr. Kubiak,” she said. “May I see what’s in the envelope?”
Caroline’s hand came off the folder.
“Officer, no. Absolutely not. That’s my private financial information, he took that out of my house…”
“Twenty-eight Thursdays,” Horace said. “That’s the first time anybody asked.”
He handed it to her.
Nine-forty
Pettit unfolded it on the hood next to Caroline’s folder. Two signatures, side by side. The one on the sale papers had a big looping K, and the one on the power of attorney had a K like a stick with two arms.
She didn’t say they were different. She photographed them both with her phone and folded the envelope back up the way it came.
That’s when Caroline started talking. She didn’t stop for a long time.
“Do you know what it costs,” she said, “to keep a man his age in that house? The roof was gone. The furnace was from 1979. He was falling. He fell in the bathroom twice before the hip, and who did he call? He didn’t call me. He called a neighbor. I found out from a neighbor. I’m his daughter. I’m the only one there is. My mother’s been dead nineteen years and I am the only one there is, and I am doing this alone, and I am doing it right. The money is in an account. It’s for him. It’s for whatever comes next, because something is coming next, and when it does, it’s going to be me in that hospital hallway, not some bus kid he hasn’t seen since Reagan.”
“Ma’am,” Pettit said.
“No. You let me finish.” Caroline pointed at me. “You want to know about him? I’ll tell you about him. He sat on that stupid bus fourteen hours a day and came home and talked about other people’s kids at dinner. This one can’t read. This one’s dad hits. This one, this one’s mom is a drunk who leaves him out in the snow. That’s you, right? You’re the drunk’s kid?”
The curb went quiet. Deepak looked at me. Kelsey looked at me.
Thirty-nine years I never said it. Not to my wife. Not to Deepak, who’s known me since we were twenty.
“She was at the Elks on 26th,” I said. “She came home at nine-forty.”
Caroline nodded like I’d proved her point.
“He told that one at Thanksgiving,” she said. “Every Thanksgiving. The little one on the steps. Like it was the best thing he ever did. And I’m across the table with a coat on, on his bus, because we couldn’t afford a second car, the only high school girl riding with the fourth graders, and everybody at school knew why.”
Horace had his eyes closed.
“I rode that bus a whole year,” she said, “and he never once let me sit up front.”
Nobody said anything.
“So yes, I sold the house. He wouldn’t sign. He wouldn’t even talk about it. I sat in that room at Saint Vincent with the papers and the pen and he looked right at me and said no. So I…”
She stopped.
Pettit had started writing.
Caroline looked at the notebook. Then at Jakub’s phone, still up, still red. Then at her father, who still had his eyes closed.
“I want a lawyer,” she said.
“You’re not under arrest, ma’am,” Pettit said. “Nobody’s under arrest. But I’m going to file a report on what I’ve been told here, and the county has an office for elder financial abuse, and they’re going to call both of you.”
She turned to Horace.
“Mr. Kubiak. Do you want to go with your daughter today?”
He opened his eyes.
“No, ma’am.”
“Do you have a way home?”
“It’s behind the car wash,” he said. “I walk it.”
“We’ll walk him,” I said.
Caroline picked up her folder. Her keys had left red teeth marks across the inside of her fingers.
“You think you’re his family now?” she said to me.
I didn’t answer. Horace answered for me.
“Caroline Anne,” he said. “I asked you to sit up front every day that year. You said the front was for babies.”
She looked at him a long time.
Then she got in her car, and she didn’t make the left. She made the right.
The Thursday after Thanksgiving
The woman from the county came out to his apartment twice. A real lawyer, a young guy named Yaakov from the legal aid on State Street, took the sale papers for nothing and said the word forgery out loud in front of all of us, then told Horace not to get his hopes up about the house.
The church called. Horace let it ring.
We go on Thursdays now. Not all six every time. Jakub works some Thursdays and Kelsey has her kid.
Deepak never brought up the Elks. Not on the ride home, not since. He just started saving me the seat by the curb, the one nearest the light.
The Thursday after Thanksgiving it was thirty-four degrees and the bank sign said so. The milk crate was there by the air pump. The cereal-box flap was gone.
Horace had a new one, on a pizza box this time, in the same black marker.
THURSDAYS 1 TO 3. BRING A CHAIR.
Somebody had left a dollar on the crate again. He took it out from under the thermos and held it up to Kelsey.
“That’s the woman in the scrubs,” he said. “She comes back every week now. I keep telling her.”
At 2:10 the silver SUV came down Peach Street in the left lane, slow, and sat at the long light.
Nobody on the curb stood up. Nobody waved. Horace unwrapped a butterscotch and held it out the side, toward the street, toward the window.
The window stayed up. The light turned. She made the left.
Horace pinched both ends of the next one, twisted them opposite ways, and handed it down to me.
“Seatbelt, Short Stack,” he said.
If somebody you know sits by himself on Thursdays, go sit on his curb for five minutes, and bring a second person.
For more family betrayals and unexpected acts of kindness, read the woman whose grocery cart was turned away until she opened her coat and the mother who claimed her name on an account made the money hers. And for another story of someone seeing life from a very different perspective, there’s the business owner who went undercover to buy bread.
