The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney
He stopped. His jaw worked.
“But the program lets you write a letter, after, if the person who got it writes to you first. And about a year later they forwarded me one. From a young woman. She didn’t sign a name, they take the name off, but she said she waited tables in a small town, and her father had passed when she was nineteen, same as my mother passed when I was nineteen, and she said she had stopped believing anything good would ever happen to her, and that I had proven her wrong.” His voice broke on that and he let it. “And she wrote one line I have carried in my coat pocket for four years. She wrote, I will try to live a life worth the gift.”
He reached into the inside pocket of that gray wedding suit, and he took out a piece of paper so soft and folded and refolded that it had gone to cloth at the creases, and I knew my own handwriting on it from across the altar.
“I figured out it was her,” Eli said. “It wasn’t hard. Small county. There was a little piece in the Prewitt paper that spring, about a local girl who got a transplant, with her picture. Delia Mercer. And I knew. And I had every chance to walk up to her and say, I’m the man who gave you your kidney, and watch her thank me for the rest of her life.” He shook his head slow. “I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want her gratitude. A woman who thanks you every day isn’t loving you, she’s paying you, and I’d watched my mother thank the Lord every day she had and I knew the difference between thanks and love. So I didn’t say it. I found an honest reason to meet her, the books needed doing, and I let her know me as I am. A quiet old welder with a shoebox and bad coffee. Not the man who saved her. Just a man. And she loved me anyway. She loved me without owing me a thing, because she never knew.”
He turned to me then, finally, and his eyes were wet and steady.
“So Maureen’s got it exactly backwards,” he said. “Delia doesn’t owe me. Delia’s the only person in four years who loved me for nothing. The kidney I gave before I ever knew her name. The love came after, free, both ways, and I was never going to tell her, because the day she found out was the day I was afraid she’d start thanking me instead of loving me.” He looked back out at the church. “I guess that day’s today. So. Delia. You can walk out of here and I’ll understand. But I didn’t trap you and I didn’t buy you. I gave a kidney to nobody and I fell in love with a stranger and it turned out to be the same person, and I have spent four years thinking that was the kindest thing God ever did, not to me, to the both of us.”