The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

The knock came at twenty minutes to eight on a Tuesday morning in June, and I knew before I reached the door that it was about the Buick.

I opened it in my housecoat, with my reading glasses pushed up into my hair. A woman I had prayed for every Sunday for two years was standing on my porch, holding a sandwich bag in both hands the way you would hold a baby bird.

Inside the bag was a card. It was yellowed and soft at the corners, and I could see my own handwriting on it from four feet away, a girl’s pencil, round and pressed too hard.

“Mrs. Nagel?” she said. “I’m Marcy. I live at 412 Cedar.”

“I know where you live,” I said.

It was the worst thing I could have said, and I heard it as it left my mouth. She blinked. I felt my face go hot clear to my collar.

“I mean,” I said, “I used to. A long time ago. Come in. Please. Let me find my shoes.”

She did not come in. She stayed on the porch with the bag against her chest, and her eyes were red in a way that told me she had been up most of the night.

“I won’t stay,” she said. “I came to ask you one thing, and I wanted to ask it to your face. Before I say anything else.”

I looked at the card in the sandwich bag. Sixty years it had been since I held it. I had not thought about its exact words in decades, and I thought about them right then, standing in my doorway, with the whole of Quincy Flats waking up around us.

To tell you what she asked me, I have to tell you about the card. And to tell you about the card, I have to go back to the summer I was fourteen.

My name is Delma Nagel. I am seventy-four years old. I have lived in Quincy Flats, South Dakota, all my life, and I have gone to the same Lutheran church for all seventy-four years of it.

My father died in March of 1966. He was fifty-one. He was forking silage in the barn behind a feed lot he managed outside of town, and he sat down on a bale to catch his breath and did not get up again.

He left us the house on Cedar Street, which had a mortgage on it, and a pickup with a bad transmission. He also left a stack of unpaid feed-store bills that my mother, Lula, spread out on the kitchen table one night in April and looked at without saying a word.

We were a family of three. My brother had gone to the Army the year before, and he sent money when he could, which was not often.

Mother sewed. She altered wedding dresses and let down hems for half the county, and she ran the sewing machine until her shoulder gave out some nights. It was not enough to carry a house.

The house was a square two-story, built in 1912, white with green trim and a deep front porch. It had an oak hall with a staircase and a brass mail slot in the front door, polished by sixty years of postmen and my mother’s dishrag.

I had measured myself against the pantry doorframe every birthday since I was three. Mother had put up the first pencil mark herself, and Daddy had made the rest of them crooked, always laughing, because he said I would not stand still.