The Name on the Prayer List

Every morning at twenty to six, before the coffee, I stood at the kitchen window over the sink, where I could see the machine shed, and I said his name out loud. Not a long prayer. “Lord, here is Perry. You know where he is. Amen.” Then I put the coffee on.

On Tuesday mornings I sat with the prayer circle in the church basement. There were seven of us then, all women, all past fifty, with Marlys at the head of the folding table. We had a rule. We said a name, and nobody asked how that person was doing, and nobody gave advice. We simply held it up, like a lamp.

Marlys prayed for Perry every Tuesday for twenty-one years, until the Tuesday she could not come anymore. She never once asked me whether he had called.

In the winter of 2002 a cousin of Owen’s in Omaha told me Perry had moved west and had a post office box in Ogden, Utah. That is three states from Iowa. It might as well have been the moon.

I wrote him a Christmas card that December. I wrote one every year after. They said the same thing, in the same words, and I never changed it, because I wanted him to know it would not change.

“Merry Christmas, Perry. I love you. Mom.”

I never mentioned the church. I never mentioned the prayer card. Not once in twenty-six years did I write the word “pray” to my son.

People have asked me why, and Ruthie has asked me angrier than anyone, so I will answer it here.

A prayer is not a leash.

I did not want Perry to learn he was on a list in a church bulletin and feel a hand on the back of his neck. I did not want him to come home because a mother had guilt-tripped him with God’s help. If he came, I wanted it to be because he had decided it with his own two feet.

So I prayed in secret, the way you would put a lamp in a window and not tell the traveler it was lit.

Not one of those cards ever came back. Not one was answered. The post office never returned them, so I knew the box was real, and I knew they were being picked up, and I decided that was something.

I would be lying if I said it was always faith.

In the fall of 2004, five and a half years in, I stopped praying. I did not tell anyone. I simply stood at the kitchen window one morning, opened my mouth, and nothing came. I was angry at God in a way I had never been in my life, cold and still, the way you are angry at a friend who has let you down in front of people.

I stood there every morning for three weeks, saying nothing. Not even “Amen.”

But on Sunday I went to church, because that is what I did, and I sat in the third pew, and I picked up the pencil.

My mouth would not pray. But my hand would write.

I wrote his name the way I had always written it, and I handed it to the usher, and I understood something I did not have words for until years later. The prayer had not stopped. It had only moved from my mouth to my hand. It was still going. It was just being carried.

Ruthie did not take it the way I did.