The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

I did not say a word to anyone. I went home, and I opened the fourth notebook, and I wrote her name.

Marcy. Tyler, her boy. Let her sleep. Let her find somebody to sit with. Let the house be kept.

Then I sat in my Buick, Sunday after Sunday, across from Cedar Street, and I watched a light come on in the front room at three, then four in the morning when I drove by early, and I prayed the best I knew how.

I never got out of the car.

It was in March of this year that the trouble started, though I did not know it was trouble. There was a county deputy in the café, a young fellow named Brad, and I heard him telling Ruthie about a call he took the week before.

“A lady on Cedar thinks somebody’s casing her place,” he said. “A gray Buick, parked across the street every Sunday afternoon, an hour at a time. She wrote down the plate.”

My hand shook so that I set down my fork.

“I told her,” said Brad, laughing, “I said, ma’am, that’s just Delma Nagel. She’s been parked there since before I was born. I think she’s praying.”

Ruthie looked at me over his head. I put down a five-dollar bill and left my pie.

I will tell you the truth. I was ashamed, down to my shoes. I had spent sixty years keeping a promise to my mother not to look in other people’s windows, and a woman living in that house had seen me as a prowler.

I thought, I have frightened her. A widow with a boy. I have sat out there like a thief, and she has been afraid in her own front room.

So I moved the car. For three Sundays I parked a block and a half down, by the Lutheran parsonage, where I could barely see the porch. I told myself it was the shade. It was not the shade.

That was also the spring I went to the eye doctor in Huron.

I had been having trouble with the edge of things. The white line on the highway had gone soft, and on Cedar Street I could no longer read the numbers on the houses. I had told no one but Ruthie.

The doctor was a gentle man with a slow voice. He said the word that begins with mac, and said that mine was the dry kind but it was moving. He said I could keep my license until it came due in August, but that I should not expect to pass the vision test.

I sat in the parking lot afterward with my hands on the wheel. It was a perfectly sunny day.

Seventy-four years old, and I thought, I will have one more summer of Sundays. After that, no more car. No more mulberry tree, and no more Cedar Street, and nobody to say Marcy’s name for her but me, in a chair, from two miles off.

So that is how I came to be standing in my own doorway on a Tuesday in June, with a woman I had never spoken to holding my fourteen-year-old self out to me in a sandwich bag.

“Please,” I said. “You’ll tell me what you came for. But let me sit you down first.”