The Man I Prayed for by Name

“No. Let me.” He took a breath. “Fifteen years ago this week I was driving home on Township Road 41. I’d been awake a day. I fell asleep. I crossed the line, and I killed a woman in a green Buick.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he pushed through it. “Her name was Dorothy. They told me at the hearing. I don’t know anything else about her except she was coming home from choir. I’ve said her name every morning since, at the end of the driveway before I get in the truck. I say, ‘Dorothy, and whoever she left.’ I figured somebody ought to be saying her name. I figured whoever she left needed it said.”

I had not moved. I do not think I had breathed.

“I’m not asking you to say anything,” he said. “I’m not a man who deserves a bag of groceries. I’m a man who’d rather you knew.”

I reached into the pocket of my apron, where I had put it that afternoon without quite deciding to, and took out an index card. The edges had gone soft as cloth. The ink had faded to the color of weak tea. I put it on the table between us, face up.

“Her name was Dorothy Ann,” I said. “I called her Nadine. She was my sister. My name is Verna Ensley.”

He did not understand. Then he did, all at once, and I watched it cross his face like a hand across a window.

“I’m the one she left,” I said. “I’m the whoever.”

He made a sound I will not forget. He put one hand over his mouth and the other flat on the table, as if the room had tipped. Maren, who had gone completely still, slid the box of tissues toward him without looking.

“All this time,” he said, around his hand. “You knew my name the first day, and you gave me…” He could not finish. “Why would you do that?”

“Read the card,” I said.

He picked it up with both hands. It said, in my handwriting, his full name, and beneath it, Lord, make me able to forgive him before I die. He turned it over and read the back. He read it again, and then he put his forehead down on the table next to the cup and cried, not loudly, a heavy shaking that went all the way down his back.

I got up from my folding chair and walked around the end of the table and put my hand on the top of that gray head. It felt like picking up a very small bird.

“I asked for this for fifteen years,” I said. “Every morning at my window. I asked the Lord to make me able to forgive you before I died. And I couldn’t do it. I tried and I couldn’t. And then He sent you down the basement stairs with an empty bag.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said into the table. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know you are. I forgive you, Royce.”

I had expected thunder. I had expected a bell or a light, my chest opening, something enormous coming through.

It was nothing like that. It was like setting down a sack of potatoes I had carried so long I had stopped knowing it was weight. My arms felt light. They felt a little strange, as if they did not know what to do with themselves.

Maren was crying openly by then, her glasses pushed up on her forehead. She put one hand on his shoulder and one on mine and said, “Well. Lord, here we all are,” and none of us laughed, but it was close.

When Royce lifted his head his face was a mess, and he said in a voice that sounded very young, “I prayed for you. I didn’t know who you were. I just wanted somebody to have said it.”

“I know,” I said. “Somebody did.”