It was the right coffee. I do not know how many people in this life have made me my coffee correctly without being shown. Ray was one. After him, I would have said no one.
He sat in the vinyl chair by the window. “Mind if I say a blessing over the sandwich?”
He did not fold his hands the way the Sunday school children do. He kept them loose between his knees with his cap hanging from one finger. “Lord, thank You for this food. Thank You for the lady it’s for. Keep her going. Amen.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
It was the shortest grace I ever heard, and he said it like a man talking to someone he had known a long time and did not need to impress. I had stuffed that man into a box marked unbeliever, on the strength of a back pew and a habit of leaving before the benediction.
He came every evening for thirty-four days. When a blizzard shut the pass, he walked the last mile from the highway and said, “Road’s a little slick.” He told me what he had built that day, a cherry kitchen island, shelves for a man who collected old radios. I asked him why he had gone into carpentry. “It was the only thing I was ever any good at that held still.”
I laughed. He smiled with one corner of his mouth, and I realized I had never seen that man smile at me without first being smiled at.
One evening in the second week, working a splinter out of his thumb with a pocketknife, he began to talk to the thumb. “My dad left on a Tuesday. I was twelve. I came home and the truck was gone and Mom was at the table with a pile of bills. She said, ‘It’s just us now.’ I said okay, and I went out and cut the grass, because it needed cutting. I cut it twice. I thought if I was useful enough, nobody would leave.”
He wiped the knife on his jeans. “Then I started drinking, because a man can only be useful so long before he wants to be somebody else. I hit that mailbox at twenty-seven. I paid for the box and the post and a new flag, and the woman who owned it, Joyce, made me a sandwich. But that mailbox is the least of what I broke. I got sober three years later in a church basement over in the county seat. Thursday nights. Eleven years in March.”
“Thursday nights,” I said.
“That’s where I do most of my talking to the Lord. Bad coffee and folding chairs. I’m not so good in a sanctuary. I sit in the back and leave early because by the last hymn I’m usually in a state, and I’d rather be in it by myself.”
“Garrick,” I said, “there is something I owe you.”
He looked up fast.
I had spent three weeks building the sentence in the dark. But he folded the pocketknife shut, slow, and set it on his knee.
“Mrs. Wahl, whatever you’re working up to, you can set it down.”
“But I want to.”
“I know. It’s not owed.” He said it gently, but there was a wall in it. “I’d just as soon you got your hip back. We can talk about the rest when you’re standing.” And in the next breath he asked whether they had given me the good walker or the one with the bad wheel.