The Trucker I Fed at Denny’s in 1998 Just Bought My Daughter’s Kidney
The surgery was on a Tuesday morning in April.
We spent Monday at the hospital.
Katie and Ray played gin rummy for four hours.
He beat her twelve games to three and said she was letting him win, and she said she absolutely was, and he laughed until the nurse came in to check his oxygen.
I sat in the corner and watched them and tried to fix the picture in my mind so I would never lose it.
That night, when Katie went back to the hotel with Denise, who had flown in that morning, I stayed.
Ray was tired but he wanted to talk.
“You never remarried,” he said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I thought about it.
“I got tired of being disappointed. Katie was enough.”
He nodded.
“Linda used to say the same thing about me and driving. She said I was married to the road and she was my mistress.” He smiled.
“She wasn’t wrong.”
“Ray. Are you scared?”
“About tomorrow?”
“About all of it.”
He looked out the window.
The lights of Tulsa were coming on, one by one.
“I was scared for a long time,” he said.
“When I first got the diagnosis. Scared of the pain, mostly. Scared of dying alone in a bed somewhere.”
“You won’t be alone.”
He looked at me.
“I know. That’s what I’m saying. Since I found you and Katie, I haven’t been scared. I’ve been in a hurry. That’s different.”
He reached over and took my hand.
“Melanie. I need you to know something. When I walked out of that Denny’s, I thought about coming back in and telling you what you’d done. I decided not to. I decided if I said it out loud it might not be true. I’ve regretted that for twenty-six years.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I could have thanked you.”
“You’re thanking me now.”
He squeezed my hand.
“Not enough,” he said.
“Never enough.”
—
The surgery took six hours.
They wheeled Ray in first.
He was awake and joking with the anesthesiologist about how he’d rather be driving to El Paso.
Katie went in twenty minutes later.
She held my hand until the doors closed and then she was gone.
Denise and I sat in the waiting room.
I read the same page of a Redbook magazine forty times without seeing any of it.
At 2:14 in the afternoon a surgeon came out and said Katie was in recovery.
The kidney was already producing urine.
Everything looked textbook.
He used the word beautifully.
He said the kidney had settled in beautifully.
At 3:40 another surgeon came out and said Ray had come through the donation well.
His vitals were good.
His pain was managed.
He was asking for pancakes.
I went to see Ray first.
He was groggy but he was smiling.
“Did she get it?”
“She got it, Ray. She got it and it’s working.”
He closed his eyes and a tear ran down his temple into his hair.
“Good,” he said.
“Good.”
—
Ray lived for seven more weeks.
He came to Kansas with us for the first two.
He stayed in the guest room and ate what he could and sat on the porch in the afternoons and watched Katie get stronger.
Color coming back into her face.
Swelling going down.
The tired lifting out of her eyes.
He taught her how to play cribbage.
She taught him how to text without capitalizing every word.
When he started to fade, he went back to Tulsa.
He wanted to die in the house he had shared with Patty.
Hospice came in.
Katie flew down for the last week.
She was there when he went.
She was holding his hand.
He was quiet at the end, she told me.
He asked her once if the kidney still felt okay.
She said yes.
He said good, and closed his eyes, and slept.
—
The trust paid off my house.
It paid off Katie’s medical debt.
It set her up in a small apartment near the hospital in Kansas City so she could be close to her doctors, and it covered her tuition when she went back to school in the fall.
She’s studying to be a social worker.
She wants to work with kidney patients.
I still clean houses.
I don’t have to, but I like the work and I like my clients.
On my breaks I sit in my car and eat granola bars and think about how strange a life can turn.
The napkin is in a frame on Katie’s bookshelf.
She keeps it next to a picture of Ray at seventy-six and a picture of me at twenty-two in the brown Denny’s polo, holding the coffee pot, laughing at something off camera.
Last month, Katie was at a diner near her school.
Late shift, studying for an exam.
A woman came in with two kids and sat in the booth across from her.
The kids ordered chocolate milk and the woman ordered water.
Katie watched her count change out of a Ziploc bag.
Katie waved the waitress over.
“Whatever they want,” she said.
“Put it on my check.”
The woman tried to say no.
Katie smiled at her.
She has my mother’s smile, everybody says so.
“It’s already done,” Katie said.
“Somebody did it for me once.”
She paid the check and left before the woman could thank her.
On the receipt, in the tip line, she’d written a name.
Ray.