The Name on the Prayer List

I did two things.

First, I asked Doris, who still had weeks left at her desk, to send one single reply to that address. I wrote it out for her on a card, in pencil, and she typed it exactly.

“The porch light is on. Sunday dinner is at noon. There is a place set. Mom.”

That was all. I did not sign it with a prayer. I did not mention God.

Second, I told her to leave his line off the Sunday bulletin.

Doris dropped her hands in her lap. “Inez. Twenty-six years.”

“I know.”

“If he doesn’t come, you will have taken him off for nothing.”

I had thought of that. I had thought of that all night.

“I did not put him on the list so he would come,” I said. “I put him on the list because I love him. And I will take him off because I am done asking God how to run it. I have asked 1,386 times. I’d like to say thank you instead. In advance.”

I did not know until I said it that this was what I meant.

You see, I had been praying a prayer with a shape. I wanted the answer to be a certain door, opening at a certain time. And for twenty-six years God had not given me that door. But he had given me Doris and her folder, and a man in Utah who could not say “I’m sorry” but could say “keep the page up.” He had given me Ruthie’s hand and Marlys’s Tuesdays and a pencil on a string.

Prayer had been answered. It had been answered all along. I just had not liked the shape.

So I would give thanks for it, and I would hand it over, and I would let it go out of my hands, even if he never came.

On Friday I told Pastor Verl, who is forty or so, with a beard, and has been with us only four years. He said he would like to say a word about it from the pulpit, if I was willing. I told him what I wanted said, and not one word more.

On Saturday night, though I did not know it until later, Doris went to the Tuesday circle. There were five of us left. She told Bev and Lorna what she had sent, and what had been in the folder, and what I had decided.

They did what Harmon women do. They got on the telephone.

Bev called five households. Each of those called five more. By ten o’clock that night, and I learned this a long time after, more than thirty homes in our little town were praying for the same thing. They did not all know the details. They knew only this, which Bev said on the phone, word for word: “Pray tonight for a man on the road, and a woman at a window. Safe roads. A soft heart on both ends.”

My neighbor Harold told me later that he stood in his kitchen in his sock feet and prayed for a man he did not know. He said he felt a fool, and he did it anyway.

I was in my own kitchen that night, alone. The porch light was on. I had put out the good plates, the ones with the blue rim. I had set a place at the table.

I had not slept in two nights.