The Name on the Prayer List

He was sitting in the back pew, in Owen’s place. He was forty-eight years old, with gray at his temples and Owen’s jaw, and a green three-ring binder on his lap. He held it with both hands, the way you hold something you are afraid to drop.

Beside him sat a tall young woman with my mother’s dark eyes. She had her hand on his sleeve.

Neither of them had moved.

I walked the length of that church. I do not remember it.

I stood in front of him in the last pew. For a moment he did not look up, and I thought, he cannot, and I understood that. Then he lifted his face.

He had been crying a long time. Maybe since Nebraska.

“Hi, Mom,” my son said.

I said his name. It was all I had.

I did not hold him. Not first. I put my hand on the top of the binder, because I could not yet put it on him.

“What is this?” I asked.

He opened it.

I want you to see what I saw.

It was full of paper. Page after page after page, each one a printed church bulletin, in plastic sleeves, in order. Our bulletin. Harmon Community Church. The first one on top was dated October 6, 2013. The last one at the back was from last Sunday.

On every page, in pencil, beside the Remembering in Prayer column, was a single line underlined.

“Perry, wherever the road has taken him, and the road home.”

Twelve years of Sundays. Six hundred and some pages.

“I found the website in 2013,” he said. His voice was thick. “I was looking for Dad’s obituary. I wanted to see if anyone had written anything. I put in Harmon and Alsup and I got a bulletin, and I scrolled, and there it was.”

He drew a breath.

“I knew it was me, Mom. Nobody else would write it like that. It was your sentence. The road home. You say that about the cattle.”

I laughed, and it came out of me like a sob.

“I didn’t know what to do. I was drinking pretty hard then. I thought, she’s praying for me, and I wasn’t worth it, and I couldn’t answer, because what would I say?” He turned a page, and it shook. “So I printed it out. Every Sunday at six, Utah time, before work. I thought if I could hold it in my hand, it wouldn’t float away. And I read your line. And one Sunday I said it back. I didn’t know how to pray. I just said, if somebody’s asking for me, I’m here.”

He put his finger on a page. It was from March of 2016.

In the margin, beside the line, in his own hand, were two small words.

“Day six.”

“That was when I quit,” he said. “Six days. I stopped drinking on the fourteenth. It’s nine years now. I did it a Sunday at a time, with your line. It was the only thing in my life that didn’t change.”

I could not speak.

“I should have called,” he said. “I wanted to. Every March I’d sit down and write to the church, because I couldn’t write to you. I thought if I could ask you to keep it going, you’d know. And then Thursday night Hannah found your answer in my email, and she read it out loud.” He looked at the young woman beside him. “She had read every page in that binder. She’s the one who put the keys in my hand.”