Why?” The boy looked down at his boots, then back up at me. His eyes were intensely serious. “My name is Tommy, sir. You probably don’t know me. But… I knew your wife.” Just hearing Ellen’s name out loud made my breath catch in my throat.

“You knew Ellen?” Tommy nodded, his grip tightening on his hat. “Yes, sir. When I was eight years old, I was in a bad way. My folks were going through a terrible divorce. We didn’t have any money, and I was falling completely through the cracks at school.

I was heavily dyslexic, but nobody bothered to test me for it. They just called me slow. The other kids were brutal about it. I couldn’t read a single word, and I was so ashamed I stopped trying altogether.” He took a deep breath, looking past me toward the farmhouse.

“I used to hide out in the county library after school just to avoid going home. That’s where Mrs. Ellen found me. She saw me looking at picture books and figured out pretty quick that I couldn’t actually read the words. She didn’t make a big deal out of it.

She didn’t embarrass me or drag my teachers into it. She just sat down next to me and started helping.” I felt the tears pooling in the corners of my eyes. Ellen had been an avid reader, a woman who consumed novels like they were oxygen.

But she had never mentioned tutoring a child. “She met me there every Thursday afternoon for three straight years,” Tommy continued, his voice thick with emotion. “She never told a soul. She bought me my own books. She brought me snacks. She sat there with infinite patience while I stumbled over basic words, over and over again.

She taught me how to read, sir. But more than that, she made me feel like I wasn’t stupid. She saved my life.” I couldn’t speak. I just stood there in the cold yard, overwhelmed by the profound, quiet goodness of the woman I had loved.

Even now, five years gone, she was still surprising me. “When I was eleven, she got sick,” Tommy said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “I remember the last time I saw her at the library. She looked really tired, and she told me she wasn’t going to be able to come on Thursdays anymore.

I cried, and I begged her not to leave me. She hugged me tight and told me how proud she was of the man I was going to become.” Tommy stepped forward, closing the distance between us. “Before she left that day, she made me promise her one thing.

She said, ‘Tommy, my husband is a proud, stubborn man. When I’m gone, he’s never going to ask anyone for help, even when he needs it.