The Man I Prayed for by Name

The Back of the Card

That second week of October, I stopped being able to say the prayer.

I do not mean I had lost my faith. I mean the words would not come out right. I went to the window on a Tuesday morning with my coffee and the card, and I said his name, and then I looked down at the line I had written fifteen years before, Lord, make me able to forgive him before I die, and I could not make my mouth say it.

It felt like a lie, not about my heart, but about the request. I had been asking the Lord for the ability to do a thing, and He had put the man himself in front of me at a bagging table. It would have been like asking God to teach me to swim while I stood waist deep in the creek.

I stood there a long while. And for some reason I turned the card over.

I had not looked at the back in years. There was a line on it in pencil that I had forgotten, in Elton’s small upright script, the handwriting of a man who spent forty years writing feed tickets. He must have put it there that first year, when I was out of the room, and I never knew.

It said: Ask anyway. E.

I read it six or seven times. Then I put my head on the kitchen table and laughed and cried and laughed again, because that man had been dead for seven years and he had still had the last word at my window, and he had said it the way he always did, softly, without pushing.

Ask anyway.

Not “feel it.” Not “arrive at it.” Ask, and keep asking, and keep standing at the table. The answer to my prayer was not going to be a feeling that fell on me like weather. It was going to be a Thursday, and another Thursday, and a bag of groceries, and a man carrying crates, and the Lord, who is not in a hurry, taking His time to bring two people into one room.

That morning I changed the prayer. I said his name. And then I said, “Lord, show me what to do with Thursday.”

The Fifteenth Year

It was the third Thursday of October, fifteen years to the week since the curve past the creamery.

I had put a small pot of chrysanthemums on Nadine’s grave on Tuesday, as I had every year, and told myself that Thursday would be a Thursday.

Four o’clock came. The basement filled. The crates came down from the truck. Royce did not come.

At twenty past five Maren came around to the end of my table and said quietly, “He might not be coming tonight. It might be a hard week for him.”

“You think he knows the date.”

“I think a man doesn’t forget it,” Maren said.

We began to put away the tables. It was dark at the windows by the time the basement door opened, at ten minutes before six, and I knew the weight of the footsteps on the stair before I looked.

He came down slowly, one hand on the rail. He had not shaved. The canvas bag stayed folded in his pocket. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and said, “I’m sorry. I know you’re closing. I wasn’t going to come.”

“You’re not late,” Maren said. “Sit down. Have some coffee.”

“I can’t stay.” But he sat anyway, on a folding chair at the end of the table, as though his legs had made the decision. Maren put a cup in front of him. I had already packed his bag, and I set it on the table beside him, and for a minute we all three sat without a word while the fluorescent light hummed.

“It’s a hard day for me,” he said finally. “It always is.”

“You don’t have to say,” I told him.

“I know.” He turned the cup in his hands. “I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud to a person in this county. I think it’s you.” He looked at me then, directly, for the first time since I had known him. “You’ve been kind to me. I don’t deserve it. That’s why I’m going to say it, so you know what you’ve been kind to.”

“Royce,” Maren said gently.