The Name on the Prayer List

Doris was the church secretary for thirty-one years. She typed that bulletin every Thursday night, on one of those big old computers in the office, with her glasses on a chain. She was retiring at the end of this October, at eighty-one, to go live with her daughter in Des Moines.

On the first Tuesday of the month she asked me to come by the church office.

She did not say why. She had a cardboard box on the desk, and she had been crying. Doris is not a crier.

She took a manila folder out of the box and set it in front of me. It was thick. On the tab, in her square handwriting, she had written one word: Friend.

“Inez,” she said, “I should have given you this eleven years ago.”

I opened it.

Inside were printed emails, twelve of them. Each was a single page, and each was nearly empty. They had come to the church office address, one a year, every year from 2014, and every one of them was sent on the eleventh of March.

I knew that date the way I know my own birthday. It was the day Owen died.

Each message read exactly the same.

“Please keep the bulletins online. Thank you. A friend.”

The sender’s address was a string of letters and numbers. On each one, Doris’s mail program had noted, in small gray letters, the place it had come from. The same word, twelve times.

Utah.

I read all twelve. I did not breathe through most of them.

“I didn’t know,” Doris said, “if it was him. And I was afraid.” She pressed her hand flat to her chest. “I was afraid it wasn’t, and I would break your heart. And I was afraid it was, and if I wrote back he would be frightened off and never write again. So I prayed on it. Inez, I prayed on it for eleven years, and I never got a clear answer, so I did nothing. And that was my sin. I am eighty-one years old and I will not leave this office with that on me.”

I want to tell you I was angry. I looked for the anger and I could not find it.

I put my hand on hers instead. “Doris, you typed his name every Thursday for twenty-six years. You were part of it. You prayed it with your fingers.”

She cried openly then. Doris, who never cried.

I went home with the folder. I sat in Owen’s chair in the kitchen, and I put the twelve pages in a row on the table.

Keep the bulletins online.

He was reading his own name.

The next morning I called Ruthie, and she came over in her work coat, and I laid the pages out in front of her. She read them one at a time. When she was finished, she put her fist to her mouth.

“Mom,” she said, finally. “You could write back.”

“I could.”

“Doris has the address. You could write to him right now.”

I shook my head. This was the hardest thing I have ever decided, and I decided it in my kitchen with the radio off.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because for twenty-six years I’ve said a prayer is not a leash. If I write him now, with all of it behind me, it is a rope. He’ll feel it.” I took her hand. “He found his way to the bulletin. He found a way to say something to us once a year. I’ll answer him the way he spoke. In the bulletin.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Mom, what are you going to say?”