The Prayer Chain and the Birthday Party

Then I looked at Donna. She was standing by the urn with a coffee cup in each hand, and she had gone still the way people go still when they’ve just figured something out.

I did not want to do it in front of everybody.

But she had done it in front of a hundred and forty people, and I thought it would be a lie to stand up there and pretend it had happened by itself.

“Donna,” I said. “I love you, and I know you love him. I know you did this because you love him. But it was mine to tell. It was mine and Ben’s. And I asked.”

She set the two coffee cups down on the table very carefully, one and then the other.

Nobody said anything. I sat down. My knees were shaking so badly under the table that I held them together with my hands.

Then Pastor Jim cleared his throat again, and he said something I will remember the rest of my life.

“Jessica’s right,” he said. “And that’s on me as much as anybody. The rule we’ve always had on the prayer chain is that we ask the family first. I haven’t been saying it out loud. I should have been.”

“So I’ll say it now,” he went on, “and we’ll put it at the top of every email from here on.” He looked around the room. “And I’ll see all of you Saturday at two.”

The parking lot

It was full dark when we came out.

The air had that first sharp smell of real fall, wet leaves and somebody’s woodstove, and the grain dryer at the elevator was roaring across town the way it does every October night.

I was buckling Eli into his car seat when I heard Donna’s shoes on the gravel behind me. I finished the buckle. I closed the door gently. Then I turned around.

She had her arms crossed tight over her sweater, not angry, just holding herself together. She was crying without making any noise, which is how the women in Ben’s family cry.

“I had a brother,” she said. “Did Ben ever tell you that? Danny. He was four years younger than me.”

I shook my head. Ben had mentioned an uncle who died before we met. That was all.

“Danny was different,” she said. “He didn’t talk till he was almost five. He rocked. He lined up the canning jar lids on the kitchen floor in rows, all the way to the back door, and if you stepped on one he would scream like you had stepped on him.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“In 1977 my folks took him out of school. The principal said he wasn’t fit for it. And after that he just stayed home. When company came, Mother put him in the back bedroom. When we went to church, he stayed with a neighbor. I was eleven. I thought that was just how it was.”

“Donna.”

“He lived with Mother until she passed, and then he went to the county home, and he died there in 2004, and there were nine people at his funeral, and I don’t think three of them knew his middle name.” Her voice broke. “Nobody prayed for Danny. Nobody even said his name out loud. We hid him like he was something we did wrong.”

The grain dryer roared. A pickup went by slow on Main Street with its radio low.