The Name on the Prayer List

“Yes,” I said. “You did.”

“I’m driving up Saturday. I’ll tell him.”

He set his boots by the back door that night, side by side, the way a man does when he means to find them in the morning. They were still there when the funeral home came.

I did not tell Perry about the boots. I did not tell anyone. I want you to hold onto that, because I held onto it for twenty-six years, and it nearly cost me everything.

The funeral was the Monday after, at the church where I sat that October morning. Perry came in late, in a borrowed tie, and stood at the back. He looked like a boy who had been hit. I wanted to go to him, and I did not, because I was greeting people at the front, and a woman needs somewhere to put her hands.

Afterward, in the fellowship hall, with the ham sandwiches and the sheet cakes and a hundred and twenty people balancing paper plates, Perry found me at the coffee urn.

I will give you his words exactly, because I have never lost them.

“You all handed him the shovel, Mom. You stood there and let that farm bury him, and you let him say what he said to me, and now he’s gone and I never got to hear him say it different.”

The room went quiet in a ring, the way a pond does around a stone.

I said nothing.

I want to be honest about that, because it matters more than anything Perry said. I had the boots in my mind. I had Owen’s sentence, “I said it wrong.” I could have said both things in one breath. I stood there with a coffee cup in my hand and could not make my mouth move, because I was afraid the words would sound like an excuse for a dead man, and I was afraid they would sound true, and I did not know which scared me more.

Ruthie did the talking instead. She was nineteen, with her father’s jaw, and she had not slept in four days.

“Then go,” she said. “Nobody here needs you to make it about you.”

He looked at his sister. He looked at me one more time, waiting, I think, for me to say something.

I said nothing.

He walked out through the double doors. I heard his truck start in the gravel lot, and I stood there until the sound turned onto the county road and was gone.

Six days later I was in the third pew, and my hand picked up the pencil on its string.

I did not decide to do it. I want to say that too. I had not made a vow. I did not have a plan or a theology. I only knew I could not pray the way I used to, with long words, and that I could still write a name.

So I wrote it. “Perry, wherever the road has taken him, and the road home.”

I handed the card to the usher without looking at him. Doris typed it that week and every week after, and she never asked me one question.

Let me tell you what the prayer looked like, because people imagine something grand. It was not grand. It was plain work, like feeding stock.

On Sundays, I wrote the card.