The Prayer He Finally Asked For
“I am not a person who needs a babysitter,” Arlen said from the recliner.
“Good,” Roxanne said without turning around. “I’ve got nine patients and I don’t have time for one. I am here to look at your ankles.”
He actually laughed. It turned into a cough, and she waited it out with her hand flat on his back.
I walked her to her truck afterward. It was spitting snow.
“He’s a hard one,” I said.
“He’s frightened,” she said. “They almost all are, the strong ones. They just wear it different. And Mrs. Lorenz, some of them talk at night, near the end. If he does, don’t hush him. Just listen.”
I said I would. I didn’t believe her. I thought: not this man.
On Wednesday, Pastor Steve came by.
Steve Albright is thirty-nine, with a farmer’s hands, and he has been our pastor six years. He has never pushed Arlen. Not once. Arlen had made it clear that if the man came in with a Bible, he’d go out to the barn in his socks.
So I was relieved, and a little astonished, when Steve came up the porch steps carrying a pie.
“Inez Tulley baked it,” he said. “Dutch apple.”
“I’m not going to talk about it,” Arlen said from the recliner. He had not stood up. He looked small in that chair. His shirt was too big at the collar.
“Okay,” Steve said.
“Then what are you here for?”
Steve set the pie on the counter. “Purdue is playing at seven,” he said. “My wife thinks basketball is too loud. I was hoping you’d let me watch it here.”
Arlen stared at him.
“They’re not going to win,” Arlen said.
“No, sir. I don’t think they are.”
Steve sat down on the edge of our couch with his hands between his knees.
They watched the whole game. Arlen ate half a piece of pie, which was more than he had eaten in two days, and I stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel and watched my husband and my pastor yell at a television together. Purdue lost by nine. “Told you,” Arlen said.
At the door, Steve put his coat on and turned to me.
“I did not say one word,” he said quietly.
“I noticed.”
“I won’t. Not unless he asks.”
I stood on the porch and watched his taillights go down the lane.
Which brings me back to Thursday night, and to two in the morning, and to the yellow square on the ceiling.
I pulled the recliner up next to the bed and took Arlen’s hand. It was cold and very light, a hand made of paper and knuckles. For fifty-three years that hand had been big enough to cover my whole fist.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
“I had a brother,” he said.
“I know that. Alton. He drowned when you were boys.”
“You don’t know the rest.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
Arlen kept his eyes on the ceiling.
“It was April of ‘sixty-three,” he said. “The creek was up. A week of rain. Dad had gone to the Farm Bureau meeting in town, and before he left he told me, Arlen, you keep an eye on your brother. I was twelve. Alton was seven.”