The Prayer Chain and the Birthday Party

“When you told me about Eli at the sink,” she said, “all I could think was, not this one. Nobody is going to hide this one. I wanted every person in that church to know his name and say it to God every morning. I thought that was the opposite of what we did to Danny. I thought I was doing the opposite.”

I believed her. I want to be honest about that. Standing in that parking lot, I believed every word, and I understood her better than I ever had in seven years.

“I know,” I said. “I know you were. But Donna, you told it the way people told it about Danny. Like something was wrong with him. Like he needed fixing. Healing. They look at him in the store now like he’s broken.”

“I wrote healing because I don’t know any other way to pray,” she said. “And I wrote that you were struggling because you were. I heard you crying in my bathroom on Sunday. With the fan on.”

That stopped me. Because it was true. I had gone in there after dinner and cried for ten minutes with the fan running, and I had thought nobody heard.

“I was,” I said. “I was struggling. But that was mine to tell, too.”

She nodded for a long time. Then she said, “What do I do? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

I thought about it. I could have said a lot of things. I didn’t want to say any of them.

“Make the cake,” I said. “A sheet cake. Chocolate, with white frosting, no writing on it. He doesn’t like the writing. And come early, and sit with him.”

She laughed, one wet little laugh, and put her hand flat on her chest. “I can make a cake.”

“I know you can.”

Ben was leaning on my car. I hadn’t known he was there.

He had shut the combine down at a quarter to seven, left a half-finished field, and driven straight to town, and he had come down the basement stairs in his work coat just as Pastor Jim started the list. He’d heard the whole thing from the stairwell door.

He hugged his mother first, a long time, without saying anything. Then she went to her car, and he looked at me over the roof of mine.

“Thirty-some people, Jess,” he said, with his cap in his hand. “You just invited thirty-some people to our living room.”

“Forty,” I said. “And everybody on the email.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he grinned, which he doesn’t do as much as he should. “I’ll sweep the porch.”