Editor’s Note: Jim Schaap has not written a short story for about 15 years . . . until now.

An aging bag of chocolates is stuck way back in the third shelf of the cupboard to the right of the sink. The kids have no idea, and neither does Landon, which means they are all preciously mine. They’re not for special days or lazy days; they’re for special moments, when I’m just plain sick of it. I pour my coffee and, alone in the house, reach back into the cupboard and fish out a half-dozen kisses, line them up like little shooting gallery ducks. When Brook called, I had two down, maybe three.

“It’s just that something like this never happened before, never—and then it’s the memory wing too,” Brook said. Brook goes over the top a lot, so you’ve got to take her in stride. On she went. “And it’s your grandma this dude came to see.” She stopped.

“How’d he get in there?”

“He didn’t look dangerous,” she told me. “Dixie let him in because there wasn’t anything not to be trusted in those eyes.” 

“You know my shift starts in an hour. Are you saying I should come in earlier?”

“I’m not panicking—none of us are,” she said, “but Dixie told me to call. His name is Richard Simmelink. That mean anything to you?’”

“It’s Dutch,” I said. 

“Near as we can tell, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” Brook told me, “but we all agreed that you should know.”

“I’ll be there at two,” I told her.

Long pause.

“You guys really want me to come now, don’t you?”

Long pause the second. “You know anybody with that name?” she said.

Simmelink was the kind of name I might have heard in church. “No,” I said.

Those succulent kisses were smarting off in front of me, so I stuck them back in the bag. “You’ve got money on this, don’t you?” I said. “You’re all bunched up and you set something up, betting on who the stranger is in my grandma’s room.”

“Dixie says she shouldn’t have let him in.”

“You’re scared—is that it?”

“Just come in early. We don’t want him to leave.”

For years, Grandma has sung in choirs and ensembles throughout the city. She knew a whole crowd of music types I didn’t know. Maybe Richard Simmelink was a music guy. Even after retirement, she was always going off to a rehearsal somewhere—or a concert. Countless times when we were kids, she’d hustle us off to her piano—a baby grand that today none of us really want—and insist that we sing. When I was a kid, it was a great joy because our singing with her pleased Grandma so much. There we sat beside her on the bench blasting out some old hymn, “something peppy,” she used to say, as if we were far too easily bored. 

Instead of following Grandma into music, I became a nurse. At Heartland Manor. Heartland Manor, as we like to say, is a grab bag. That’s not very elegant, but it’s what the crew who work there like to say to each other—me too. Heartland takes all kinds—that’s what we mean. We have a memory unit with just a half dozen beds, we’ve got long term care, hospice care, skilled nursing, and assisted living—the whole range. When the board decided we might just turn a buck on rehab, we grew an addition that will hold a dozen people in need of extended therapy. What I’m saying is that we’ve got a little of everything. It’s a grab bag, but I love the work and the place and the staff. Better than chocolates. Sometimes.

When I was fifteen years old, we lived in the city, and I saw a man who seemed totally oblivious to the traffic at an intersection that you really shouldn’t cross without a light.

Helping people was not something I did every day when I was a kid, but when I tried to talk to that poor guy and he couldn’t answer, I figured I simply had to help. He was lost and confused. I couldn’t help thinking, God only knows how to get this guy home. But when that’s exactly what happened—I actually got the guy home. I knew I wanted to be a nurse.

An obsessive distaste of blood pushed me to reconsider, but when I blew out a knee playing volleyball in college, I fell in love with occupational therapy. So, I work at the grab bag, the kind of place where staff might just get together and bet on who the stranger is, the old guy visiting Anne’s grandma, a woman who really hasn’t spoken at all in two months. I knew they couldn’t help themselves—they had to know who would sit at her bedside, put his cap down on his lap, and what? . . . talk? Brook didn’t say a word about what was going on, only that he was there, only that they know he’s not her husband because Grandpa is tucked away in another room with Parkinson’s. Yes, both my grandparents live at Heartland. It’s super sad. 

“Well-kept,” is the way Brook described the guy. In nurse-ese, at least at the Manor, that means once upon a time he was probably ruggedly handsome. 

Brook convinced me to come in, and I was there before the mystery man left.

“Does his car have out-of-state plates?” I asked Dixie when I arrived.

She rolled her eyes. “I got time to see such things, honey?”

 As I entered my grandma’s room, he saw my badge, maybe even read my name, but had no idea who I was.

“There’s some activity, I suppose?” he asked, thinking I was going to take her somewhere. “I tried to time it so she wouldn’t be eating.”

I told him he was fine, that keeping residents on schedule when they were as advanced as Helen was not necessarily helpful. He looked away and at Grandma again.

“You know her from a concert I bet, an old choir from the city?”

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t interested in me. I seemed, honestly, a distraction. I tried again. 

“You went to college with her?” I asked. “Grad school?”

More silence. He was impossible. I grabbed a chair from beside the opposite wall and brought it up close to Gran. Her face had color, but little else to distinguish her from death itself. She didn’t move, hadn’t for a week, maybe more. We weren’t expecting her to stay with us, not for very long anyway.

“Maybe a week now since she’s, on her own, moved around some,” I told him. 

No answer. Like I said, I was of little interest to him.

We’ve lived out here away from the city for most of our married life, so I’ve seen lots and lots of farmers. Mr. Simmelink was not a farmer.

“I think I knew a Simmelink who taught music at a small college across the state,” I said, and that’s when he looked at me, maybe for the first time. Dixie said his eyes held no malice, and she was right. He had a thin, sharp face, dark eyes, dark complexion, almost as if he could have been Native. “Otherwise, I can’t think of anyone I know—”

Then he smiled, a gracious living, loving smile. “I lied,” he told me, not boldly, but as if it were a confession. “The woman at the front wanted me to sign in, and I hadn’t thought of that. I was so anxious, you know. I just scribbled down a name out of nowhere.” 

He stared at me in a way that almost felt invasive but couldn’t be because his eyes emptied something and gave what was there to me. “You’re a student of hers,” I said, still guessing. “You took voice lessons—”

And then he laughed, a smile lingering. “Sixty years ago, she was the girl I loved.” 

“Seriously?”

He just smiled. Just stood there and smiled.

“And more maybe?—lover?”

He laughed. “That’s your language, not ours,” he said. “But I spent three years of my life pretty much assuming that the two of us. . .well, you know.” He waited, took a breath. “We weren’t lovers but, listen, I loved her. Does that make any sense?”

Not lovers, he said, but he loved her, emphasis on loved. The thing is, right then, right there at that moment, already he didn’t feel so much a stranger, so I thought it was time to play straight with him because I knew the story, something of it, or something of the story’s life. And his.

I motioned for him to sit down on that chair beside her bed, but he shook his head, stepped closer, and put a hand on the chair’s back. I trusted him—what can I say? I took his hand, reached for it, and simply covered it with mine. Nursing is a touching profession. Then, slowly, I broke the truth. “Your Helen is my grandma,” I told him.

That’s when he sat down.       

I knew something he couldn’t have known I knew. Dixie was right—there was nothing in his demeanor, and certainly nothing in his eyes to stop me from saying, quietly, “You cheated on her. I know the story.”

He didn’t say anything, didn’t react as I thought he would, but his silence let me know it was true. “I know a little,” I told him. “I know that years and years ago you cheated on Grandma, and sometime, somewhere back then she told you it was over. I know that much.”

The thing is, he wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed. “She told you?” he said, nodding towards Helen. 

Grandma rustled a bit, as if she needed a little more air. 

“Mom did.” That threw him off. He seemed stunned.  

“You mean you’re Helen’s daughter?” 

He was compressing generations. “Helen and Lawrence Harvey, my grandparents, had three kids, my mother the oldest.” 

“I didn’t mean to disturb her family—I never expected anything like this, or I wouldn’t have come,” he said. “You’ve got to take it easy on me.”

I gave him my nurses’ smile—all reassurance. “She loved music. She was a singer—”

“That, I know.”

“A good singer.”

“Very good—always was.”

“Three kids, all girls. My mom, Helen’s daughter, raised me and my brother.” I stopped, changed directions. “Alone, I mean. She was a single mom.” 

“And a good one, I’m sure.”

“Very good.”

I looked down at her. It had been months since Grandma was Grandma, but I honestly wished she would wake up for just a minute, look around, and see this well-kept liar here beside her. 

“The more I see you, the more I see Helen,” he said. “Can that be?”

“Of course that could be, but what about you?—you had a good life.”

Huge smile, big smile. “Well, don’t bury me—it’s not entirely past tense, although sometimes—”

“Children too?”

“Four,” he said. 

“So you both did just fine. You both had happy lives. And what did you do?”

“I was a pastor—still am, I guess. I am a pastor.”

“Who lies.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay, you got me there,” he said. I couldn’t help thinking that he really was a good man. He hadn’t been a saint in the story I knew. All I’d ever known about him was that he was a cheater in my dear grandmother’s life. It was one fact, one act really, one bit of what was becoming, at least to me, a bigger story a half-century later. Once upon a time this guy, this pastor Grandma couldn’t help loving, cheated on her. He took a dive with some sexy Sally.

“I shouldn’t be here,’ he said. He tightened his lips, looked around suspiciously. “I don’t want you to think that I came here to disturb her—that isn’t it at all. I knew she was in this condition.”

Okay, I thought. But then why? Why would he show up, sign in using somebody else’s name, all the while knowing she was mostly unresponsive? “Not to apologize?” I asked. “Not to ask forgiveness?” I don’t think right then he could have answered those questions, even to himself.

“When I remember her,” he said slowly, as if the words were forming individually, “I remember her as the girl she was sixty years ago. Can I say, she’s not the girl—you know, I, what? cheated on, I suppose, like you say.”

“You were thinking she was still twenty?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been around a couple dozen Heartlands, spent long grueling days with families bawling about loved ones at her stage.”

“Then why?”

Suddenly there was no hesitation. “Because I wanted to tell her just one thing, just one little bit of info—specifically, that sister of hers, bless her soul, wasn’t right about the way she called things.”

“Her sister?” I knew the story, at least in outline.       

“Her sister told her, all those years back. . .We were up on a hill in my crappy old Plymouth, took more oil than gas, there we sat, and she told me, no nonsense, that it was over between us because her sister told her that if I do it once, I’ll sure as anything do it again.” He looked at her, then at me. “That’s what I’ve never forgotten—that—what should I call it?—that prediction, that curse.” He stood, looking like he was going to leave. “Had your grandmother been conscious, I would never have come. Would have been confusing, I’m sure.”

“You’re not kidding?”

“No, I’m not.”

“It just stuck in me that she was in a hospital room somewhere, maybe not even suffering, a whole different person than the girl I loved long ago once upon a time. And she was well on her way into eternity. That’s the way I saw it, and I thought I would come—that I wanted to come” He nodded toward her.

“You loved her?” I said.

“Let’s just put it this way.” For just a moment, hesitation crept in, as if the storytelling was over. 

“I’m listening,” I said. 

“For three years your grandma meant everything to me.” He looked around the room. “I’ve spent long hours in places like this. I know what Alzheimer’s does to good people. I know all of that.” He raised his hands and folded them on his head. Then he looked straight into my eyes. “Meeting you was a complete surprise. I couldn’t help wonder about her life, but that’s not why I came either.”

“You were the one in bed with someone else,” I said to the preacher.

“Her sister told her that if I did it once, she could bet I’d do it again—and Helen didn’t want that.”

“End of things right there?” I asked.

“End of things,” he repeated. “Right there in that old Plymouth, and I never saw her again.”

“Until today.”

“Until today.” He reached for my hand. “I have to go. Meeting you was a joy and a blessing—”

“You can’t just walk away.” I wanted to know. Right then, I needed to know. I’ve seen more than my share of preachers who flop into bed with women other than their own beloveds. Whether he was still a cheater—I wanted to know and needed to know.

“Then what?” I asked. “Then what?—was Helen’s older sister right or wrong?”

He looked down at his feet. “Do you mean, did I do it again?”

I let the silence speak.

He didn’t reach out for me, didn’t touch me, didn’t make any move towards me at all, and that’s why I believed what he said was true. He shook his head to tell me no. The pastor, whatever his name, was no serial adulterer. 

Nurses get a look at so many fellow sufferers that they get to know who to believe and when, and right there that afternoon, at that touchless but tender leave-taking, I believed him. I did.

He thanked me kindly for, he said, helping him. It was as if he knew he shouldn’t hug me, so he didn’t. 

I grabbed his hand in both of mine.

“Thanks again,” he told me.

***

I would have liked to tell the crew, then and there, the whole story, but it would have taken me half a shift. So, once he was out the door, and half the bunch was down at the front, all ears, I just said, “Boyfriend.”

It was a day at Heartland we all would remember. The stranger was, like they said, “well-kept.”

“And one more thing,” I told them. “He was a pastor.”

That sent up an immediate howl.

***

He’d come all the way across the state to tell Gran that, sixty years ago, her sister was wrong because he hadn’t cheated again. That’s what he needed to say, even though, and maybe because, Gran would never know. The curse, his curse, was lifted.

My dad fell in love with a student. Suddenly, they were a thing. I thought Mom let Dad go too easily. I loved my dad. Still do.

One night, Mom told me that Gran had told her about being cheated on when she was young and in love. Gran’s sister had told her, Mom said, that if the guy cheats once, he’ll do it again. It’s the way things were.

In those fifteen minutes between Heartland and home, I couldn’t help thinking that Pastor Simmelink, or whatever, would have had a much longer ride home had I told him that the story didn’t end one tearful night with a young woman in an old Plymouth up on a hill above a river. It wound its way through a couple more generations, even me, a kid from a broken home.

There’s more I could have told him, but I’m happy I didn’t tell him. 

I turned it over in my mind and finally decided he didn’t need to know more than what he lived with for all those years.

I don’t know his real name. I could find it out, I’m sure, but I don’t think I’m going to. Don’t need to. Right now I’m happy I didn’t tell him any more than I did.