The woman pressed the speaker button. A young woman’s voice filled the reception room, steady but full of emotion. “Hi. My name is Dr. Amelia Ross. I was six years old in that blizzard. My mom is the one holding this phone.” She paused. “I remember being on Mr. Raymond’s back. I remember he sang to me so I wouldn’t fall asleep in the cold. He sang ‘You Are My Sunshine’ for four miles.”
My mother made a sound I had never heard her make. That was the song Dad sang to me every night when I was little. Dr. Ross continued. “His truck jackknifed trying to block the wind from our car. He carried me, my mom carried my little brother, and he went back for the bags. When we got to the rest stop, his feet were frostbitten. He told the paramedics he was fine. He drove a borrowed car home the next day.”
Then her voice changed. “I asked my mom to call because I heard who was speaking at the service.” Uncle Preston straightened his lanyard. “Mr. Preston, I’m an emergency physician. I work at your hospital. I’ve worked there four years. I became a doctor because a truck driver refused to let a little girl freeze.”
The room didn’t make a sound. Preston slowly took the lanyard off his neck and held it in his hands like he didn’t know what it was for. Dr. Ross said, more gently now, “I’m sorry I couldn’t come in person. I’m on shift. But tell his family he was going somewhere, all those years. He was going to people.”
The call ended. The woman in the gray dress, Amelia’s mother, walked to my father’s casket and laid a small, faded child’s mitten on top of it. I recognized it from the glove box of Dad’s truck, where it had been for eighteen years. He told us he found it on the road. Uncle Preston didn’t speak again that day. But at the cemetery, he was the first one to pick up a shovel, and he didn’t stop until the grave was filled.
