“I’ve driven this neighborhood for three summers. Two weeks ago, your daughter came up to my window, and when I saw her, I felt like I was looking at a ghost.” Family
I stared at him.
“She looks exactly like you did at her age.”
My stomach tightened.
“Then she told me her name was Ellie. I casually asked what her mother’s name was. She said Sarah.”
He shook his head.
“I couldn’t believe it.”
“I still don’t understand how you know me.”
He hesitated.
“Do you remember Maple Street?”
My chest tightened.
“In Millbrook?”
The world seemed to shift slightly.
Maple Street.
My childhood street. ChildCare
Four hundred miles away.
The place where my mother had once walked me to an ice cream truck on summer evenings.
“How do you know that?”
The man removed his baseball cap and held it against his chest.
“Because I used to drive the ice cream truck there.”
I stared at him.
“The Maple Street route. Back in the eighties and nineties. I drove it for almost twenty years.”
He smiled faintly.
“You probably wouldn’t remember me. You were little.”
Then his eyes became wet.
“But I remember you.”
He looked at the strawberry shortcake bar Ellie was now holding.
“You always ordered that one.”
Something stirred in my memory.
Not a complete picture.
Fragments.
A white truck.
Summer evenings.
Coins warm in my hand.
A friendly man behind a window.
And always, somehow, my strawberry shortcake bar ready before I asked.
“You were that man?”
“That was me.”
His voice was almost a whisper.
“I used to have yours ready when I saw you running down the street.”
I stood there, trying to understand how a forgotten piece of childhood had somehow appeared in my adult neighborhood. ChildCare
“But Millbrook is four hundred miles away.”
“I know.”
“And you’ve been here three summers?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
His expression changed again.
This time there was something heavier underneath it.
Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an envelope.
It was folded and worn around the edges, as though he had been carrying it for days.
My name was written across the front.
Sarah.
“I was actually going to give this to Ellie,” he said.
I looked at him.
“To give to me?”
“I’ve been carrying it for about a week.”
He looked embarrassed.
“I kept trying to figure out how to explain who I was without sounding like some strange old man telling a little girl I knew her mother.” Pregnancy& Maternity
He held the envelope through the window.
“But now you’re here.”
