A man I loaned $5,000 to in 1988 knocked on my door last week. I didn’t recognize him at first, because we had worked one summer on the same crew and I hadn’t seen him since. He’d needed the money for a bus ticket, and I never expected to see it again. He didn’t come to pay me back, which was what I assumed when I opened the door with my hand out. Instead, he smiled and said he’d been looking for me since 2003.
He told me it had taken twenty-two years because he’d had the wrong middle initial the entire time. He said the two hundred dollars I gave him got him home, and getting home changed everything that happened afterward. I asked what he meant, and he said he couldn’t explain it without showing me something. Then he went back to his truck and returned carrying a small metal box with both hands. He set it on my kitchen table and told me he’d kept it for thirty-seven years.
Inside was an old bus ticket, a photograph, and a folded piece of paper with my name written across the front. I recognized the handwriting immediately because it was mine, although I had no memory of writing it. He said the paper had been inside the box when he bought it from a man who had helped him after he got home. I opened it and found a short list of names, including mine, followed by dates from 1988. The date beside my name was the day I loaned him the money. I asked why my name would have been written down before he even left town, and he said that was the part he’d spent decades trying to understand.
Then he showed me the photograph. It was a picture of our crew standing outside the worksite, but there was one extra person in the background whom neither of us recognized. He was standing beside my truck, holding the same metal box. On the back of the photograph was a sentence written in the same handwriting as the note: “He’ll come looking for this when he remembers what happened that night.” I told him I had no idea what it meant, but he shook his head and said he’d heard the same thing from the man who gave him the box in 1988. Then he turned it over one more time and showed me the date written underneath the sentence—it was three days after I supposedly left that job.
