THE PROVIDER-Part 1: He Was the Kindest Man in Town. Every Kindness Was a Door Closing Behind Me.

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This is The Provider. Episode 1. Shelter. I want to tell you about the kindest man I ever met. I need you to sit with that word. Kindest. Because everything I'm about to describe was kindness. Real kindness. The kind you'd be grateful for. And I need you to promise me something before I start.

0:45 Don't decide, three minutes from now, that you'd have seen it. That you'd have known better. That you'd have gotten up out of that warm chair and walked back out into the cold. Everybody thinks that. I thought that. About other people. My whole life. And then it was me in the chair. And the fire was going. And there was a plate of food in front of me. And a man was asking nothing of me at all. And I want you to understand. You would have stayed too. That's not the horror of it. That's just the truth of it. The horror comes later. Let me tell you how I got to the chair. The year I turned forty-one. Everything I had came apart in my hands. I'm not going to sit here and tell you none of it was my fault,

1:36 because I've spent a long time since then trying to sort out which parts were bad luck and which parts were me. And the honest answer is, I can't always tell, and that not being able to tell is the whole beginning of this story. The marriage went first, then the job, which had been the one thing holding the schedule together.

1:58 which meant that when the custody arrangement got written down on paper, the woman it described was a woman with no income and no fixed address and a habit, the lawyer said, of instability. That woman got her two kids every other weekend, supervised, pending review. That woman was me. By October I was sleeping in my car, I don't say that for sympathy. I say it so you understand the temperature of my life when Walt found me. Because temperature matters in this story more than anything. It was getting cold. The kind of cold that comes into a parked car around three in the morning and sits on your chest. I'd wake up with my hands aching and my breath white, and I would lie there doing the math of the day, where I could shower, where I

2:49 could charge my phone, whether I could see my kids that weekend, and whether they'd be able to tell... from looking at me, how far down I'd gone. That's the shame I want you to hold on to, not the being poor, the being seen, the certainty, bone deep by then, that I had proven myself to be a person who could not be trusted to run her own life. That somebody ought to be in charge of me, because look at the evidence, look at what I did with the job of being me. There'd been a visit, the weekend before Walt found me, supervised, an hour, in a beige room, at a family services centre, with a woman sitting in the corner with a clipboard, watching me be a mother.

3:37 My daughter was nine, and my son was six, and they came in shy with me. Careful, the way you're careful with someone you've been told is having a hard time. and I spent the whole hour terrified that I smelt like the car, like a person who slept in a car, and that they could tell. My daughter asked me where I lived now, and I lied. I sat in that beige room and lied to my nine-year-old about having a home, with a stranger writing it down, and when the hour was up, I watched them leave with their father, and I went back out to the parking lot, and sat in the cold, and understood, all the way down, That I had become a person who had to be supervised around her own children. That a clipboard now stood between

4:24 me and them. That somebody official had looked at my life and decided I couldn't be trusted with it, and that they were not wrong. So when I say Walt found me, I mean I was already sure I needed finding. I wasn't looking for rescue. I was looking for a keeper, and I'd have said yes to almost anyone who offered.

4:46 Everybody in that town knew Walt. That was the first thing. He wasn't a stranger who pulled up next to my car. He was the man who'd paid for the new roof on the food bank, who'd co-signed half the town's second chances, whose name came up any time somebody was down and somebody else said, well, have you talked to Walt? Sixty-some years old, big and soft and slow-moving, with a voice like a warm hand on your shoulder. He found me because a woman at the church I'd been getting coffee at mentioned there was somebody living rough in the lot behind the hardware store, and Walt did what Walt did, which was come and see. He didn't lecture me. That's important.

5:30 He didn't ask what happened, didn't make me tell the story, didn't do the thing where a helpful person makes you narrate your failure in exchange for the help. He just crouched down by my window in the cold, this big gentle man, and he looked at me for a while, and he said, You'll freeze out here, honey. I've got a room. It's warm, and nobody's using it, and you'd be doing me a favor, taking it off my hands.

5:57 A favor, like I'd be helping him. I want to be able to tell you, I hesitated. I didn't. I followed his truck to his house like a dog follows a person with food, and I have thought since about how easy it was How little he had to do. Because the truth is, he wasn't reeling me in. I was already swimming toward the boat. The house was warm.

6:23 I have to make you feel this. Because if you don't feel it, you won't understand any of the rest. Why I stayed. Why I defended him. Why it took what it took. After weeks in that car, walking into Walt's house was like walking into a body. The heat of it came up around me. and my hands started to hurt the way they hurt when the feeling comes back, and there was a smell of something cooking, and lamps on, low and gold, and every surface was soft. Rugs, cushions, throws over the backs of the chairs. He sat me down in a deep armchair by a fire that was actually going, an actual fire, and a woman brought me a plate. That was Ellen. I didn't think much about Ellen that first night, She was somewhere in her fifties, quiet, pleasant,

7:16 moving around the house like she'd been part of it forever. And she put a plate in my lap, real food, hot food, more than I'd eaten in a week, and she smiled at me and said, He's a good man. You landed soft. I said something grateful. She said it again, a little later, unprompted, almost to herself, wiping down a counter that was already clean. You landed soft. I noticed it, and then I let it go. The way you let a thing go when you are warm for the first time in weeks, and someone is refilling your plate. I filed it under nothing. I've unfiled it since. I did ask her, that first night. how long she'd been with Walt.

8:13 She had to think about it. That was the thing that should have reached me, and didn't. She genuinely had to stop and count, standing there with the dishcloth, her mouth moving a little, before she said, oh, getting on for eleven years now, I suppose. Eleven years, and she'd had to work it out, the way you'd work out how long you'd lived somewhere, not how long you'd been doing a job or staying a while. like the years had gone soft and run together, like time in that house didn't have edges. She said it without any weight at all, and then she smiled and asked if I wanted more, and I said yes, and she filled my plate again. And I let the eleven years slide right off me into the warm. Walt asked me nothing that night.

9:02 He sat across from me with his own plate, And he talked, easy, about the town, about the weather turning, about a leak he was fixing at the church, and he let me just be warm and full and quiet. And when I started to cry, which I did, because kindness will do that to you when you've been out in the cold, he didn't make anything of it. He handed me a napkin and kept talking so I wouldn't have to be watched while I did it. I remember thinking, This is the first person in a year who has not made me perform being okay. I remember loving him a little, right then. I want you to know that I loved him a little from the first night, because that's the lock, and I put my own hand to it.

9:52 The first strange thing happened three days later, and it was so small. I'd been trying to claw back one piece of myself. i had a little money coming a final check from the job a few hundred dollars and i decided i would use it to pay walt something rent a token anything so that i was a person who paid her way and not a stray he'd taken in It mattered to me more than I can say.

10:22 I called the old payroll office to ask where the check was going, since I'd changed addresses, and the woman on the phone was confused, because, she said, that had already been sorted out. A gentleman had called on my behalf. Everything had been redirected and handled. She said it like it was good news. She said, he seemed very nice.

10:45 I stood in Walt's warm hallway, holding the phone... and I felt something go cool in the middle of all that warmth, just for a second. I found Walt in the kitchen, and I asked him, careful, light, still smiling, whether he'd called about my check, and he looked up from what he was doing with the most open, easy face, no guilt in it anywhere, because there was no guilt in him, and he said, oh, that, yes, you had so much on your plate, honey. I didn't want you sitting on hold for an hour with those people. I took care of it. It's handled. And he smiled at me, warm, waiting for me to be relieved. And here is the thing I keep coming back to. He was right. It was one less thing. He had saved me an hour

11:35 on hold and a headache, and he had asked for nothing, and the money, he assured me, was safe, set aside. I didn't need to worry about a penny of it, Every single piece of it was help, and I said thank you. Of course I said thank you. What kind of person wouldn't? But I'd wanted to pay him. That was mine. That little plan. My one small handhold on being a person who stood on her own, and without ever meaning me a moment of harm, he had reached out and, gently, taken it, and turned it into one more thing he'd done for me. I couldn't even find the shape of the objection. Every way I tried to say it in my head came out sounding ungrateful, sounding crazy, sounding like a woman who couldn't accept kindness, which, the

12:23 lawyers had already established, was exactly the kind of woman I was. Ellen was in the doorway. She'd heard the whole thing. And when Walt turned back to the stove, she caught my eye and she gave me a small look, and I couldn't read it then. I can read it now. And she said, Quiet. He's just like that. You'll get used to it. not surprised, not troubled, used to it, like it was weather. That night he told me the other thing, the one that kept me awake. We were by the fire and he was being so gentle, and he mentioned, the way you'd mention picking up milk, that he'd spoken to my ex-husband, that he knew Gary a little, through the rotary, and that he'd had a friendly word, just to smooth things, just to let Gary know I'd

13:11 landed somewhere stable and respectable now. that I was back on my feet, because that could only help me, couldn't it, when it came to the kids. He said it kindly. He said it like a gift. And it was a gift. That was the unbearable part. It probably would help. A man like Walt vouching for me might do more for my custody case than anything I could say for myself.

13:38 I thanked him. I did. I sat in that warm chair, and I thanked the man who had, without asking me, without any way for me to have said no, inserted himself between me and my own children, and made himself the reason I might get to see them. And then I went up to the warm room he'd given me, and I lay in the dark, under a heavy soft quilt, warmer than I'd been in months, safe, fed, cared for, and I could not sleep, because something had happened downstairs and I couldn't name it. He had done nothing but help me, Every fact was a kindness. I went through it and through it, and every single item on the list was a thing I should be grateful for, and I was grateful. And underneath the gratitude, somewhere I couldn't

14:29 get to, something had quietly closed, like a door in another room that you don't hear so much as feel. A change in the pressure of the house. I told myself it was nerves. I told myself, I wasn't used to being taken care of. That was all, that a person who's been cold for a long time flinches at warmth, that the wrongness I felt was in me, damaged goods, not in him. That's what I told myself, that first night in the warm. I would go on telling myself that for a long time, longer than I want to admit to you, right up until it was nearly too late to tell myself anything at all.