The Prayer He Finally Asked For
“Lo,” he said. “There’s something else.”
“Go ahead.”
“I knew you were back there.”
I did not understand at first.
“Every Sunday,” he said. “Right behind my head. I could feel it on my neck, like the sun comes through the window in August. I knew you were praying for me. I didn’t know the words, but I knew it. Thirty-four years. I never did figure out how a woman could be that stubborn.”
I let out a sound that was half a laugh and half something else.
“You knew?”
“I knew the first Sunday. After your mother. You put your hand on the back of the pew right behind my shoulder, and I felt it, and I thought, she’s started something. And every Sunday after, it was there.” His mouth twitched. “I’d have been a poorer man without it.”
“You never said.”
“I didn’t know how.” He took a rattling breath around the tube. “Lo. I’m scared.”
“I know.”
“No. I mean I’m scared of the other side of this. If I’m told no again. I couldn’t stand it twice.” He closed his eyes. “But I’m more scared of going without having tried. That’s the new thing, since Monday. Seventy-five years old and I’m scared of both.”
“Arlen.”
“I don’t remember how it goes. Isn’t that something?” he said, with a small, awful laugh. “I knew all of it once. Mama taught us. ‘Now I lay me.’ I can’t get past the second line. I’ve been lying here since Monday trying to say it.”
Then he said, “Lo. Teach me.”
“You must know how it goes by now.” He opened his eyes. “Say it slow. Say the one you say. I want to hear how a prayer sounds when somebody means it.”
The oxygen machine hummed. Down the lane, a coyote started up and stopped.
I took his hand in both of mine and held it against my chest.
And I opened my mouth to say it, the prayer I had said to the back of his head seventeen hundred times.
I said it out loud for the first time in thirty-four years.
“Lord,” I said, and I had to start again. “Lord, here is Arlen. He has come.”
His chin moved. Then his whole head went forward, slowly, the way a tired horse lowers its head at the end of a long day. The gray hair at the crown came toward me. His eyes closed. His lips began to move.
I was looking at the top of my husband’s head.
For thirty-four years, I had known only the back of it. The stubble, the collar of his good shirt, the one cowlick behind the left ear. And now I was looking down on the crown of it, bent and bare in the yellow light.
“Go on,” he whispered. “Say it.”
“Let him bow his own head,” I said. “That’s what I’ve said. Every Sunday. That was all of it. I never asked for anything else.”
“That’s the one?”
“That’s the whole prayer.”
“Same one. Thirty-four years.”
“The same.”
He was quiet. His lips moved on something I could not hear. I stayed bent over his hand and did not look.
After a long time he said, in a small clear voice, “Well. It took.”
And then he said, “Amen.”