The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney

He asked me to the fish fry at the Legion hall three weeks later, and he was so nervous asking that he knocked a box of welding rods off the bench and we both pretended not to notice. We went. He wore a shirt with the creases still in it from the package. He opened every door and he listened more than he talked, which after a lifetime of men who did the opposite felt like being handed a glass of cold water, and when he dropped me at my mother’s he shook my hand, if you can believe it, shook my hand like we had closed a business deal, and I laughed about it for a week and then I thought about it for a month.

We courted, is the old word for it, and it is the right one. For a year and a half we courted. He came to the Skillet on my shifts and sat at the counter and ate more pie than any man should and left tips that embarrassed me. I went out to the shop and sat on an upturned bucket and read to him while he welded, which he said helped him concentrate though I think he just liked the company. He met my mother and she loved him inside of an hour because he fixed her storm door without being asked. I met his people, what there was of them, which was mostly his older sister Maureen, who lived over in Deever and ran the church guild and had opinions about everyone and everything, and who looked at me across her own kitchen table the first time we met like she was pricing a heifer.

I did not know yet to be afraid of Maureen. I should have been.

Eli proposed to me on the county road halfway between his shop and my town, in the truck, pulled over on the shoulder with the hazards on and the beans gone gold in the ditches, and he did it so plainly and so terrified that I started crying before he got the question all the way out. He had the ring in a little velvet box that his hands shook so bad he could not get open, and I had to open it myself, and I said yes about four times before he believed me. He told me he had loved me since the coffee. He told me he had not thought a woman like me would ever look twice at a quiet old welder, and that he had made up his mind to just be grateful for the bookkeeping and never say a word, and that it had taken him a year and a half to work up the nerve.

I thought that was the whole story of him. The shyness. The year and a half. I thought I knew why Eli Hartman had taken so long to tell me he loved me.

I did not know anything.