The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

I wrote let them keep the house again and again, until the page was gray with it. They kept it. I do not know how. I have learned that you often do not.

Then came Rollie, in 1996, a widower with a bad back and a worse thirst. I saw the bottles in his recycling bin when the wind blew the lid off. I prayed for Rollie for seven years, and some Sundays there was nothing in me but his name.

One morning in 2003, Ruthie set down my coffee at the Corner Café and said, out of nowhere, “Rollie on Cedar got his one-year chip at the meeting in the Methodist basement. The whole room stood up.”

I could not drink my coffee. Ruthie looked at me and understood, because Ruthie has known about the notebooks since high school, and in all those years she has never once breathed a word.

“Did that have something to do with you?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I only said his name.”

“Well,” said Ruthie, patting my hand. “Somebody did a good deal more than that.”

Then Tina and her three boys, in 2004, and Tina worked nights at the nursing home and came home as the school bus left. I prayed those boys would be fed, and warm, and know somebody was keeping watch.

I did not know that the Ladies Aid had been slipping Tina a grocery sack from the church pantry every Friday for six years. I found out when her second boy was baptized and a whole row of women went up to hold the baby. Prayer has hands, I learned, and they are usually somebody else’s.

The house stood empty from 2014 to 2019, a bank house with the porch sagging and the grass to my knees. I prayed for it all the same. I prayed for the house itself, and I prayed for whoever was coming, a name I did not know yet.

I want to say a word about Perry.

I married Perry Nagel in 1972. He was a quiet man, a bookkeeper at the grain elevator, who proposed to me in the front seat of his Ford in front of the Dairy Dip and said it was a practical idea.

On my second Sunday as his wife, I said I had an errand, and I got in the car, and Perry said, “I’ll drive.”

I said I could go alone. He said he knew that.

He drove me to Cedar Street. He parked under the mulberry, and he took a newspaper out of the door pocket and unfolded it across the steering wheel, and he never asked me one thing.

It went on for fifty-one years. He brought a thermos of coffee on cold days. He brought two cups. When I was done, which I could always tell him without a word, he would fold the paper and start the car, and say, “Well, that’s that.”

He died on a Thursday in November of 2023, with the paper unfolded on his lap. I drove the Buick myself the Sunday after the funeral, and the passenger seat was so empty I took the thermos out of the door pocket and put it on the seat, to give it something to hold.

That is who I was when Marcy bought the house.

She came in the fall of 2024, a woman of forty-one or so, with a teenage boy and a rented truck. I heard in the café that her husband, Dan, had died the winter before in a wreck on the highway. She had taken the job as school secretary, and she had bought the cheapest old house in Quincy Flats with whatever the insurance left.