The Man I Prayed for by Name

The Letter

I got home at half past seven. The house was dark and smelled of that morning’s coffee. I turned on the kitchen light and stood in front of the drawer under the telephone book, and I opened it.

The envelope had yellowed along the edges. I sat down at the kitchen table and slit it open with a butter knife. It was one page.

Dear family of Dorothy,

I do not know your names, so I am writing to the whole of you. I am not asking for anything. I am not asking you to read this, or answer it, or forgive me. I do not think I should be forgiven and I would not know how to accept it.

I only want to tell you three things. The first is that your Dorothy did not suffer. The deputy told me so, and I have chosen to believe him. The second is that I stayed with her until they came, and I held her hand, and I said the Lord’s Prayer out loud because it was the only thing I could remember. I do not know if she heard it. The third is that I will say her name every morning for as long as I am alive, and I will say the name of whoever she left, even though I do not know it, because that is the only thing I have that she might not mind receiving.

I am more sorry than I know how to put on paper.

Royce

I read it three times. Then I laid my palm flat on top of it, as one lays a hand on a child with a fever.

It was dated eleven days after the funeral. He had written it while I was still telling the Lord I hoped he would never sleep.

For fifteen years, two people had been up before the sun saying the same woman’s name, I at a kitchen window and he at the end of a driveway. I had been praying to be able to pay a debt, and he had been praying that someone would let him. Neither of us had known the other was there.

I sat at that table and thanked the Lord out loud, in the empty kitchen, for the first time in fifteen years without any request attached to it.