Following Lawrence’s funeral service, I felt so lifeless that I had to have coffee and regain some of my energy. I was just standing there, all confused, holding a paper cup, when his lawyer approached me.
“Julie?” he asked.
I just nodded, and he then handed me an envelope and said Lawrence wanted me to have it after his funeral.
But before I could even reached for it, Peter, Lawrence’s son, intervened. Lawrence pretended like he didn’t care if Peter would come and visit him, but I knew deep down, that he did care. He looked at me as though I was some sort of a thief who had just stolen the family’s silverware. “What’s that? Is that from my father?” he demanded to know.
The lawyer turned to him and told him it was a private matter, and Peter didn’t seem happy about it. “Well, well, I didn’t know that bringing a few casseroles made her family.”
At that moment, I thought about stepping back in order not making a scene, but my curiosity about that letter was stronger, so I took it and told Peter, “My casseroles didn’t make me a family, but showing up did.”
Nine years prior, I moved to a small house next to Lawrence’s. At the time, I was going through a divorce and there wasn’t much I could afford. I was 48 at the time and had my children, Matthew and Maddison with me. I remember one night when Matthew looked at the cereal box at the kitchen counter and asked me if we were poor. I told him we were just careful, although they could sense we were at our lowest.
Lawrence lived next door and he wasn’t a kind of person who’d welcome some new neighbors with his arms wide open. In fact, whenever any of us waved at him, he’d just nod, and that was his way of showing friendliness.
Then came a massive storm in January. After several days of freezing temperatures, I noticed I hadn’t seen Lawrence outside, while a paper bag with his medicine was still at his front porch.
I stood at my kitchen window telling myself it was none of my business but Madison told me we should check him out. So, I put my coat on, made some chicken soup in a Tupperware box and went over there.
Lawrence answered my knock in a robe that was obviously old and he looked pale, irritable and was holding the door frame. “I’m fine,” he growled.
“I didn’t ask if you were fine,” I replied, gesturing toward his mailbox. “Your mail says differently.”
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of my mail, thank you very much,” he muttered, but I could tell he was shaking. I saw the closed prescription bag on his desk. “You’re sick,” I stated.
“I’m old,” he shot back. “People have trouble with that. Thank you for the medical report, nurse.”
I offered the bowl of soup, telling him to either eat it or dump it, but to just take it. He stared at me as if I’d given him a speeding ticket, but he took it.
On the following afternoon, he came knocking on my door with the empty dish in his hands. “There is way too much pepper in that soup,” he said.
I stared at the completely clean bowl. “However, somehow, you lived through it.”
He shuffled nervously, seeming rather uncomfortable before confessing that his truck wouldn’t start and his medicine was waiting for him at the drugstore. He then asked me if I intended to make him plead for help. I said no since I was on my way there anyway. He said something about paying me back and that I needn’t bother since he didn’t intend to. He just sighed as if I’d made his whole day.
This is how our friendship began. Not with any huge vows, but soup, prescriptions and two lonely people pretending otherwise.
Slowly, but surely, that became our routine. I would bring him meals, and he would message me grocery list under the guise of complaint. Gradually, he opened up his life to me. We celebrated the birthday of his deceased wife, Daisy, with a homemade crumbled lemon cake, and I began to drive him to all his doctors’ appointments. On one occasion, when the hospital nurse asked whether we were related, Lawrence said, “She’s close enough to argue with me.” His son Peter was never around. I often noticed how Lawrence looked at the phone ringing.
One evening, seven years after meeting Lawrence, I felt absolutely exhausted by the anniversary of my divorce. I confessed to him that I didn’t know myself without being a mother and being needed. Then he asked me what I would do if no one needed me for a single day. I answered that I would go to a completely silent cabin on the lake in order to have a break from everything. Lawrence thought it sounded lonely.
Two weeks after the last game of Scrabble, he died peacefully in his sleep. At his little funeral, Peter was there and started accusing me of taking advantage of an old man. I lost my temper. I told him that I took care of the food, medication, and hospital trips since he never called his father. It was then that the lawyer presented me with Lawrence’s letter.
I opened it in the car. Inside, the letter instructed me to look for the old chest freezer that Lawrence moved down into my basement for me years ago since my refrigerator was broken. At the very bottom of it, I discovered a little plastic box labeled with masking tape “Julie’s first soup. January 14.” He kept it since the very first day we met.
A brass key was taped underneath along with a note reading, “You thought it was just soup. It wasn’t. It was proof that somebody would notice if I vanished… I remembered the night when you asked for a place where you don’t need anything from anybody. This cabin by the lake is now yours.”
At the lawyer’s office the next morning, Peter attempted to argue that his father had dementia. All he could get out of the lawyer was a medical capacity letter and a final message to his son from Lawrence: “I gave it to her because she was always there on the ordinary days. Life consists of ordinary days mostly. You were absent in most of mine.” Peter informed me that I got what I wanted, but all I replied was that I only got what his father wanted me to have.
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Bored Daddy
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