The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney
We set the wedding for June, at Our Savior Lutheran in Prewitt, the church I had been baptized and confirmed in, the church where my father’s funeral had been. Pastor Okerlund would marry us. My mother and I sewed and planned for months. Maureen inserted herself into every piece of it, the flowers, the hall, the guild ladies and their casseroles, and she was cold to me the whole time in a way I could never quite point at, little remarks, little looks, a way of saying “well, isn’t that nice” that meant the opposite. I told myself she was just a hard woman who did not want to lose her brother. I told myself a lot of things that spring.
The wedding day was the kind of June morning Iowa gives you about ten of a year, clear and green and not yet too hot, the kind of day that makes you forgive the whole rest of the calendar. The church was full. Half the county came, the farmers whose books I kept and the Skillet regulars and the dialysis center nurses who had driven up from the city, and Harold, old Harold with his butterscotch candies, who was still alive and still getting his treatments and who hugged me in the narthex and said, I told you so, girl, I told you the Lord was not done with you. My mother walked me down the aisle because my father could not, and Eli stood up front in a gray suit looking like a man who had been struck by lightning and lived, and Pastor Okerlund started in on the old words, and I was the happiest I have ever been in my life, before or since.
And then, right after Pastor Okerlund asked if anyone could show just cause why we should not be joined, which everybody knows is just words, nobody ever answers that, Maureen Hartman stood up in the second pew.
She did not shout. I want you to understand that about her, because it was worse than shouting. She stood up calm and smoothed her dress and she said, in a clear carrying voice that reached every corner of that stone church, “I can show cause. Before all of you make fools of yourselves, somebody ought to tell this girl what she is really marrying.”
The church went so quiet I could hear the ceiling fans.
“She thinks it’s love,” Maureen said, and she was looking at me now, cold, almost pitying. “It isn’t love. It’s a debt. My brother gave this girl a kidney. His own kidney, out of his own body, when she was dying on a machine and nobody else in the world would help her. He has carried it around like a secret for four years. And now here she is in a white dress, and I will not sit here and watch her marry him out of guilt and call it a marriage. You don’t love him, honey. You owe him. There’s a difference, and everybody in this room deserves to know it.”