The Man I Prayed for by Name

Thursdays

He came back the next week.

He came down the steps at ten after four with the same folded canvas bag, found me, and gave a small nod. Maren, who had moved her chair to the end of my table with a face like a bank vault, wrote down his name without looking up.

I packed his bag. He said thank you. I said, “Eggs on top.” That was all that was said.

The week after that, he stayed a little longer. He took his groceries, and then, rather than leave, stood at the edge of the room with his cap in his hand and watched a younger man struggle to carry a crate of canned goods from the dock door to the shelves. He walked over and took the other end. By the end of the afternoon he had carried eleven crates.

Maren leaned toward me. “Don’t say anything,” she said. “Just let him.”

So I let him carry the heavy things, week after week, and I learned him a piece at a time, the way you learn a neighbor. He did not talk much, and neither do I, and between two people like that a great deal can pass.

I learned that his mother was eighty-one and had had a stroke in the spring, and that he had come back to Ohio to look after her after most of fifteen years in Indiana. I learned he mounted and balanced tires at a shop in the next town and that his hours had been cut in September.

I learned that he took the long way to everything. When Gladys said, “Oh, then it’s quicker to cut down 41,” he said, “I don’t care for 41, ma’am,” and looked at the floor as if the words had come out without him.

I learned that when Maren handed him a cup of coffee in the church kitchen after the third Thursday, he held it in both hands like something that might spill, and said, “I don’t drive after dark if I can help it. Not for a long time now.” Then, “Sorry. Don’t know why I said that.”

I almost told him then. The words were all the way up in my mouth.

But I kept thinking: if he knows, he will not come back, and he will go hungry before he sets foot in this basement again. If he does not know, he comes and carries crates, and that is a slow kind of grace, and it might be what I need too. I did not yet know.

It was the most uncomfortable thing I have ever done, to be kind to a man every Thursday while the whole truth stood in the room like a third person. Every night I lay awake and told the dark I was a coward. Then I told it that Nadine would have packed his groceries, too.