The Name on the Sheet
The first thing I noticed about him was the bag.
It was a canvas grocery bag, the kind the bank gives away at Christmas, and he held it folded in quarters against his chest, the way a man holds his hat in a funeral home. He stood just inside the basement door at Wren Creek United Methodist with the cold of that October Thursday still on his jacket. He looked at the folding tables and the six or seven of us in our aprons as though he had walked into the wrong house and was working out how to leave politely.
I was at the bagging table, where I have stood every Thursday afternoon since the spring after my husband died. I had a ten-pound sack of potatoes in my arms. I remember that because I did not put it down for a long time afterward.
Maren sat at the intake table with the clipboard. Maren has run our pantry for eleven years, and she has a way of looking up at each person as if they were the one she had been waiting for all day.
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“Welcome,” she said. “Have you been with us before?”
“No, ma’am. First time.”
“Nothing to be nervous about. I just need a name for the sheet, and how many are in your house.”
“Two,” he said. “Me and my mother.” He cleared his throat. “Royce.”
There are Royces in every county in Ohio. I might have let that go by, a plain first name said in a low voice by a gray-headed man in a work jacket with a tire company’s name stitched over the pocket.
Then he gave his last name, and Maren wrote it down, and I am going to leave it out of this account. It is his. It is the one thing about that afternoon I have decided to keep for him.
I will only tell you that I knew the whole name. I knew it the way you know your own telephone number. It had been in the county paper in October of 2009. It had been on a sheriff’s report and a plea form and the return address of one envelope I never opened. And for fifteen years it had been written in my own handwriting on an index card that lived in my Bible, and I had said it out loud to God at my kitchen window every single morning.
I had never once heard a living person say it in his own voice.
I stood there holding the potatoes and I could not make my arms do anything. Down the table, Gladys was calling out something about canned corn. Everything in that basement went on being an ordinary Thursday while the floor under me turned into something I had no name for.
I have to tell you how I got to that table, or what I did next will make no sense.