The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney

I have gone over what happened next many times, because it was the most important thing I have ever done and I did it without thinking at all.

I walked the three steps to Eli Hartman and I took that soft folded letter out of his hand, my own four-year-old handwriting, and I pressed it flat against his chest with both my hands, and I said, loud enough for Maureen to hear, loud enough for the whole church to hear, “I did not marry you because you gave me a kidney. I didn’t know you gave me a kidney until ninety seconds ago. I’m marrying you because of the coffee, you fool, and the storm door, and a year and a half of you being too scared to tell me, and because you are the best man I have ever known, and the kidney is the second kindest thing you ever did for me. The first is that you never told me. You let me love you free. Nobody ever gave me anything like that in my life.”

Pastor Okerlund, God bless that man, he let a moment pass, and then he said, in that dry way of his, “I believe that answers the question of just cause.” And the whole church, two hundred people, came apart at once, laughing and crying and some of them standing up, and old Harold in the back hollered out “Amen” loud enough to rattle the windows, and Pastor Okerlund married us, right there, with my handwriting still crushed between Eli’s chest and my palm.

Maureen sat down. She did not come to the hall after. She went home to Deever, and it was two years before she spoke to either of us again, and I will tell you the truth, I was not sorry for the quiet. But I have come to understand her a little, in the years since. She had loved their mother too. She had watched the same four years of waiting I never saw. And when she figured out that her brother had given away the very thing their mother died for lack of, and given it to a stranger, I think something in her could not bear it, and the only way she could make sense of the hurt was to decide I had taken something from him. She was wrong. But she was wrong the way people get wrong when they have grieved too long and never set it down.