The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

We sold it in June. It sold to a couple named Arden and Edna, who came out from the county seat and were kind about it, and who paid exactly what the bank said the house was worth and not a dollar more.

We moved into two rooms above the feed store, with a hot plate and a bathroom down the hall. Mother never said one word of complaint. She only folded things, and kept folding them, long after they were folded.

The last afternoon, we carried out the final box. Mother turned the key in the front door, and put it into Arden’s hand where he stood waiting on the walk, and thanked him.

I was standing on the porch with something in my skirt pocket.

It was a card from the funeral home, a blank one, left over from the stack they had given us for Daddy. On the front was a lamb and the Lord’s Prayer. The back was white.

The night before, I had sat on the floor of my empty bedroom with a pencil and written on that back, and then rubbed half of it out, and written it again. I had not said a word to anyone.

When Mother and Arden walked to the truck, I went back up the porch steps alone. My heart was going like a rabbit’s. I pushed the card through the brass mail slot, and I heard it drop on the oak floor of the hall.

Then I heard it slide. It skated across the boards with a small dry sound, toward the corner by the door, and it went into the dark.

I knelt down and put my eye to the slot. There was a gap there, where the baseboard had pulled a little from the floor over the years as the house settled. The card was gone.

I tried to hook it out with a finger through the slot. I could not reach. I tried a pencil, and I pushed it farther in.

I was fourteen. I had no key. I had no right to be on that porch at all, and my mother was waiting.

I stood up, and I said out loud, quietly, to a front door that was no longer ours, “Well. God knows where it is.”

Then I went down the steps and got in the truck. Mother asked where I had been, and I said I forgot something, and she did not ask what.

I will tell you what I wrote on that card, because you will want to know, and because I know it by heart even now.

To whoever lives here next. We lived here eleven years and it was a loved house. A lot of good was said in these rooms. Please be kind in it. I am going to pray for you every night, and when I find out your name I will pray it. The back step on the left side is loose. Delma, age 14.

And underneath it, smaller, because I had run out of room and wanted to say one more thing:

Lord, let this house be kept.

That was the whole of it. I was a girl who had lost her father and her house in one spring and could do nothing about either, and I had worked out that there was one thing no bank could touch. I could pray.