Nathan Fletcher’s wake was an embarrassment. Just one person showed up: a middle-aged man dressed head-to-toe in white. He was the nurse who’d taken care of Mr. Fletcher at the senior home.
He knew the old man never married or had children, so he came to make certain someone was witness to his passing. After an hour of sitting alone, the nurse collected his coat to leave. That’s when he saw him.
A well-dressed man in his 30s had entered the room. He took off his hat as a sign of respect and approached the casket. The nurse didn’t want to be nosey, but lingered a moment, curious who the stranger was. That’s when something peculiar happened.
The man leaned down and whispered something to the deceased, produced what looked like a small piece of paper, and tucked it inside the breast pocket of Nathan Fletcher’s suit. He performed the sign of the cross, put his hat back on and was gone as quickly as he’d arrived.
It happened so fast that the nurse froze, missing his chance to speak to the stranger.
A week later and 100 miles away, a secretary at an investment firm knocked on an office door and said, “Mr. Jones, there’s a man here to see you.”
Gavin Jones rose from the desk in his well-appointed office to greet a somewhat familiar face. It was the man in white he’d seen at the funeral home a week before.
“My name is Roberto Cruz; I’m a nurse at the home where Nathan Fletcher spent the last years of his life,” the man said. “I found your name in his personal items.”
He continued: “I saw you place something in Mr. Fletcher’s pocket, and curiosity got the better of me, so I took a look.”
“The photo,” Gavin said.
“Yes,” Roberto continued. “A picture of two boys holding snow shovels. Who are they?”
“It’s me and my best friend, Paul, when we were 16 years old. Mr. Fletcher took it after we shoveled the snow off of his porch.”
Gavin then offered Roberto a chair and told him a story.
“Paul and I lived a few doors down from Mr. Fletcher and, if I’m being honest, we were poor kids; especially Paul.”
“One cold winter day, when we were maybe 10, Mr. Fletcher saw Paul with socks over his hands instead of gloves. When he asked why, all my friend could do was look away with shame.”
“That’s when he told us about the magic Mulberry bush in front of his house.”
“Magic?” Roberto asked.
“He told Paul if you walked around the Mulberry bush three times, closed your eyes, and made a wish, the thing you wanted would be under the bush the next morning. We laughed at the silly old man, but Paul tried it anyway, and the next day he found brand-new gloves, a hat, and a scarf under the bush.”
Gavin explained that Paul did this twice more, once when he needed a warm coat and again for a baseball glove.
“When we got older, we knew it was Mr. Fletcher who put those things under the bush, but never spoke of it,” he said. “As a thank you, we made sure to cut his lawn in the summer and shovel his porch each winter.”
Gavin then met Roberto’s eyes.
“What he lacked in family, he made up for in kindness.”
As he stood up to go, Roberto said, “On the back of the picture were the letters HWGRTMB. What’s that?”
Gavin smiled and replied, “Here we go round the Mulberry bush.”
