The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

I went into the bedroom and knelt at the foot of the bed, and I lifted the lid of the cedar chest. It still smells of the wool my mother kept in it. I took out the fourth notebook, with its rubber band, and I carried it back to the porch against my chest.

I opened it to a page near the back. It was nearly full, in my handwriting, which has gotten shaky and has grown larger in the past year to be able to read it.

I did not need the page. I knew it. But I wanted her to see that it was real, and that it was in ink.

“The first Sunday,” I said, “which was October the twentieth, two years ago, I wrote, Marcy, and Tyler her boy. Let her sleep.”

Marcy pressed her hand against her mouth.

“Then, every Sunday, in a different order. Let her find somebody to sit with. Let the boy not be afraid of his mother’s grief. Let the roof hold. Let the pipes not freeze.”

“Let her know she is not alone in the house.” I stopped. “That last one was only a month ago.”

“Read me the first one again,” she said.

“Let her sleep.”

She laid her head back against the porch rail and shut her eyes, and she stayed like that for a long moment, while the sprinkler ticked in my neighbor’s yard.

“I haven’t slept past four since Dan died,” she said. “Not once. Not one night.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I asked.”

“Would you come over?” she said. “To the house? I mean today. Right now, if you can.”

“I haven’t been inside it,” I said, “since the afternoon I put that card through the slot.”

“I know,” said Marcy. “That’s why I’m asking.”

I changed out of my housecoat. I put on my good blue blouse and my church shoes, and I stood a moment in front of the bureau with Perry’s picture on it. I told him where I was going, and I could almost hear him say, Well, that’s that.

Marcy drove me in her pickup. Her son Tyler was waiting on the porch step when we pulled in, a long thin boy of fifteen with a haircut that his mother had obviously given him, in a faded farm co-op cap.

He took it off when he saw me. I do not know who taught him that, but I thought well of whoever it was.

“Tyler,” said Marcy, “this is Mrs. Nagel. She’s the one who wrote the card.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He looked at me with so much curiosity, and so much respect, that I nearly went to pieces on the walk.

The door was open. And there it was, the brass slot, the same one, polished by her son’s hand rag, shining in the June light.

I stepped into the hall, and I could not say a word.

They had stripped the floors to bare oak and left them raw, and the plaster was patched and waiting for paint. The staircase was the same, and so was the narrow window on the landing, with its square of colored glass no bigger than a dinner plate.

It threw one now. It was a quarter past nine in the morning, and the sun was on the other side of the house, but it threw a smaller one, a pale, faint blue one, right where it had always been.

“Oh,” I said.

“Omer said the glass was original,” said Tyler shyly. “We did not want to touch it.”