The Mum Sale the Principal Shut Down

The post I did not send

I sat at the kitchen table after supper and wrote a post for the community page, eleven paragraphs. It named Doyle and Ronnie and the seventy-five dollars, and it ended with a line about how a man who would do this to a sick child ought to be ashamed to stand in front of a flag. I thought it was the best thing I had ever written.

Colt came in from the shop around nine with grease to the elbows and read it over my shoulder, lips moving a little. He is forty-eight and has been welding for thirty years, and he is not a man who wastes words.

“That’s good,” he said. “It’s all true. You going to post it?”

I had my finger on the button. “I’m thinking about it.”

He pulled out the chair beside me and sat down, which Colt does not do at nine at night.

“Birdie,” he said. “I have never once seen you pick up a stick you didn’t plan to hit somebody with. And I love that about you. But I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to answer fast.”

“If you post that, what happens Saturday?”

“Doyle reads it. Ronnie reads it. The whole county reads it. By Thursday it’s a fight about Doyle and Birdie, and the lot is still shut, and Maddie is still in a vinyl chair in Oklahoma City.” He rubbed his jaw. “You are right, Birdie. But you can be right and still lose the thing you were trying to win.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

He went to wash up. I saved the post to a folder I never opened again, put on my coat, and drove out to the creek bridge on Hackberry Road, where I go when I need to be alone with God and a windshield.

Pray for him too

I want to be careful here. I have prayed for plenty that did not turn out, including for my mother, who died of cancer at sixty-one. I am not going to tell you God is a vending machine.

I sat there with the engine off and the cold coming up through the floorboards, and I prayed the way I had not prayed since my mother died. Not politely. I told Him Maddie was sixteen and had a clarinet she could not play and a mother who ate crackers for supper, and that now would be a good time to do something. I told Him Doyle was a hypocrite.

And when I had run dry, I sat in the quiet and something came to me that was not a voice, exactly. It was more like a question that had been waiting for me to stop talking.

It was this: Have you prayed for him?

I said, out loud, in a truck, to nobody, “No. Absolutely not.”

I sat there another ten minutes.

When I finally said Doyle’s name, it came out like I was spitting a seed. “Lord, bless Doyle.” It was not a good prayer. But I said it again, and by the third time something in my chest that had been clenched like a fist since ten minutes to seven that morning loosened a quarter turn.

I drove home. Colt had left the porch light on.

The Wednesday circle

On Wednesday morning I told the circle what I had done, without dressing it up: I was angry at Mr. Doyle, Colt had talked me out of an ugly post, and God had asked me a question at a creek bridge that I did not care for.

“What was the question?” Kaylee asked.

“Whether I’d prayed for him.”

Nobody said anything. Tyson, who is seventeen, who plays offensive line and has the neck of a bull, was looking at the floor.

“Did you?” he asked.

“Badly.”

A girl named Brynlee, the smallest person in the room and the quietest, put up her hand like she was in school. “Mrs. Varner? I think we should pray for him too. Every day, by name,” she said. “Because if we don’t, it’s just us against him. I don’t want to be the kind of person he thinks we are.”

So we did. We joined hands, eleven teenagers and a forty-six-year-old woman with a bad temper, and prayed for Doyle. Not that he would lose. We prayed for his family and his health, and that whatever he was afraid of would loosen its grip. Tyson’s prayer was the shortest I have ever heard, “God, help him, because he needs it,” and half the room laughed and the other half said amen.

Then we prayed for Maddie, and for Shanna, and for the sale. We did not pray for a miracle. We prayed for the next right thing.

We did that every morning that week, and we kept it up until a Friday night under the stadium lights.