Last in a Long Line

Bernard Walton is finishing up a window-washing job at a church in Odyssey, where Eugene Meltsner has just set up a computer database for the pastor's sermons. When Mrs. Grayson, the church secretary, pays them and heads home, Eugene proposes a shortcut back to Whit's End - straight through the cemetery. Bernard hates cemeteries; his older brother used to scare him with stories about seeing his own name on a tombstone. Eugene finds the idea perfectly relaxing, until he glances over and sees his own last name carved on a headstone. He pulls back the flowers hiding the first name and goes pale. The name on the stone is his father's.

Back at Whit's End, both men wander in looking like they have seen a ghost, and Eugene tells John Whittaker his story. He has always called himself the last in a long line, because he was told that both his parents were lost on an expedition in the rainforests of Zaire, in Africa, when he was seven. He has no aunts or uncles, and his father's father dropped out of the family after a falling-out long ago. All Eugene remembers of him is a room, a Christmas tree, a silver dollar, and a piggy bank. Whit offers to help him find the truth.

Their research turns up a family line full of doctors and scholars, but nothing about the grave, so they return to the church cemetery - and notice the grave has been carefully manicured. Mrs. Grayson meets them with the answer: every month a check arrives from a fund in Connellsville to pay for the upkeep, and the fund's three initials match the name of Eugene's grandfather. Eugene is overjoyed, sure this means he has a living relative at last, though Whit gently warns that a trust fund is not proof, and that opening this door could mean a whole lot of love or a whole lot of hurt. Eugene has to try.

While the two go relative-hunting in Connellsville, Bernard helps Lucy Cunningham-Schultz wrestle with a newspaper article about endangered species and finally tells her the whole cemetery story. In Connellsville, a housekeeper reluctantly lets Eugene and Whit into a house Eugene vaguely remembers. An elderly man there gasps at the sight of him - Eugene is the image of his father. The man is Ralph Reems, the grandfather's best friend of fifty years, and his news is heartbreaking: Eugene's grandfather died just one week earlier. Mr. Reems explains that Eugene's parents really did die in Africa, and that his grieving grandfather set up the memorial grave in Odyssey, where Eugene's father grew up, visiting it every week until he no longer could. A Christmas argument had driven the family apart after the only visit Eugene ever made. Then Mr. Reems brings out the old piggy bank - heavy, because the grandfather added a silver dollar every Christmas, never giving up hope that Eugene would come back for it. Eugene asks to see pictures of the grandfather he cannot remember.

Back at Whit's End, Lucy reads her finished article aloud: the world rushes to save endangered animals but forgets a more important endangered species - family heritage, and the Eugene Meltsners of the world, the last in a long line. Eugene pronounces it simply wonderful. Then comes one last surprise. When Whit suggests Eugene research his mother's side of the family, Bernard mentions a third cousin whose unusual maiden name is the very one Eugene found in his own family tree - which would make Bernard and Eugene cousins. Bernard flatly refuses to believe it, but "Cousin Bernie" may be stuck with Eugene after all.