The Name on the Prayer List

She married a good man named Jim, and Perry was not at the wedding. She had her first baby, a boy, and Perry was not at the hospital. She stood at the back of the church in a white dress and watched the third pew, and the empty chair beside it where her brother would have been, and I do not think she forgave either of us for that.

In the spring of 2009, when I had been writing the card for ten years, she sat down at my kitchen table and set both palms flat on the oilcloth.

“Mom, I love you. But it has been ten years.”

“I know how long it has been.”

“He made his choice. He’s not coming. And every Sunday, that line in the bulletin looks like a lost dog notice.” She was crying, and she was angry that she was crying. “People read it and feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for you. I’m tired of feeling sorry for you.”

I let her say all of it. Then I said, gently, “Ruthie, I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry. I’m asking God.”

“What if the answer is no?”

I thought about it. I want to give an honest reply, because she deserved one.

“Then I’ll have asked every Sunday for a no,” I said. “And I’ll have been the kind of mother who didn’t quit. I can live with that better than the other thing.”

She did not come to church for most of that year. I did not push. I put her name on my own card, in the second line under Perry’s, and I did not tell her. “Ruthie, for a soft heart.” Doris typed it without a word.

The years went by the way they do in a small town, one casserole at a time.

The church changed too. Pastors came and went. We got a coffee maker that actually worked. In 2012, the church started posting each week’s bulletin on a website, and I thought nothing of it, because I did not own a computer and did not care to.

In the summer of 2017 I got pneumonia, and I nearly died of it. I was in the hospital in Carroll for five weeks. I lost thirty pounds. I remember almost nothing of it, only the ceiling and the smell of the soap.

Ruthie sat beside me through most of it. She told me later what she did on the Sundays.

She went to church, alone, to the third pew. She picked up the pencil on its string. She did not know what to write.

Then she wrote it. Her mother’s line, in her own handwriting, because someone had to. “Perry, wherever the road has taken him, and the road home.”

She told me her hand shook so badly the pencil skittered. She did not pray it, she said. She could not. She only wrote it, five Sundays in a row, because she was not going to be the one who let the line break while her mother was in a hospital bed.

“I thought if I only wrote it, it wouldn’t count,” she said to me, at my kitchen table, months later. “It counted.”

My mouth did not pray on those weeks either, but my daughter’s hand did. Do you see? It had been carried again. That is the whole of what I know about prayer. It does not depend on the one person who started it.

Now I have to tell you about Doris, and I do not tell it kindly, though I love her.