The Man I Prayed for by Name

What I Said Instead

So there I stood with a ten-pound sack of potatoes against my apron and the man himself eight feet away, folding his canvas bag in quarters, and what ran through my mind was not a single holy thing.

It was the cast. It was the ten minutes in the courtroom. It was my kitchen drawer.

And, strangely, it was the thought: He is smaller than I made him.

For fifteen years I had prayed over a name. I had never given the name a body. He was perhaps five foot nine, rounder through the middle than a man should be at forty-nine, and he had taken off his cap to be polite in a church. His boots were resoled, not new. There was a place on his left wrist, below the cuff, where the bones did not quite sit straight.

He did not look like a villain. I was angry at him for it, a little, even then.

Maren was looking at me over her glasses, which meant she had seen my face change. “Verna, we’re ready for a bag at your station,” she said evenly, and handed him a slip of paper. He walked down the length of the tables and stopped across from me.

He did not know me. There was nothing in his face but the embarrassment of a man who has never had to do this before. I was a gray-haired woman in an apron with my name on a piece of masking tape stuck to my shirt. The tape said Verna, in Maren’s block letters, and nothing else.

“Afternoon,” he said.

I had practiced for fifteen years what I would say to this man if I ever met him. In the early years it was cruel. In the middle years it was a speech about my sister, in eleven parts. By the last few it had no particular words in it at all.

What I said was, “Hold your bag open, please.”

He opened it. His hands were not steady. I set down the potatoes at last and began filling the bag slowly, one item at a time, because I did not trust my voice to go faster. Rice. Two cans of green beans. Macaroni, peanut butter, a can of peaches. The carton of eggs, laid on top so it would not break. A pound of ground beef from the freezer chest. Maren’s banana bread, wrapped in wax paper, still a little soft.

I could have said it. All I had to say was, “My name is Verna Ensley, and you killed my sister.” The sentence had been ready for fifteen years. It would have cost me nothing, and it would have cost him everything, standing in a church basement with an empty bag in front of seven strangers on the first day he had ever asked anybody for help.

And I thought: he has not come here to be sentenced again. He has come for groceries.

I thought, too, of Nadine, the cafeteria woman, who could tell by how a child held his tray whether he had eaten breakfast and would put an extra roll on it without lifting her eyes. She would have slipped a second loaf into that bag without a word.

“There’s banana bread on top,” I said. “It’s Maren’s. Eat it while it’s soft.”

He looked at me, and for a second I thought he might cry, though I do not think he knew why. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Verna.”

“Verna.” He nodded. “Thank you.”

I held the bag out by the bottom, so the weight would not catch him by surprise. His fingers closed on the handle just below mine.

And I said, “Come back Thursday, Royce.”

It came out of me like a neighbor’s name. It was the first time I had ever spoken it to the man himself, and I said it just as I would to anyone coming in out of the cold.

He blinked, startled to be known by name, and then he gave me the smallest smile I have ever seen on a grown man. “Yes, ma’am. I will.”

He went up the steps with the bag against his chest. I watched the soles of his boots until the door closed.