The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

“You were right not to,” I said.

Marcy pointed at the floor by the door. A strip of baseboard was missing there, two feet long, and you could see the bare plaster and the dark crack where the oak met the boards.

“That’s where it was,” she said. “Right there. Lying flat against the wall, facing out.”

I knelt down. It took some doing, at my age. Tyler offered his arm and I let him help me, and I put my fingers in the gap, where my pencil had pushed the card sixty years before.

“I decided God knew where it was,” I said. “I was fourteen.”

“Well,” said Marcy softly. “He did.”

I stayed on my knees until my eyes cleared. Then Tyler said, in a very small voice, “Mrs. Nagel? Would you like to see the pantry?”

I did not need to be told. I walked down the hall behind that boy, and my legs knew the way better than I did.

The pantry doorframe had been scraped and sanded, and the old pencil marks were still there, a dozen of them, a little crooked, climbing up the right-hand side. There were ages beside them in my mother’s hand, and one line in my father’s.

Delma, age 8, said the one in my mother’s hand. And above it, in my father’s careful block capitals, Won’t stand still.

I put my hand on the wood.

“I wanted to leave it,” said Marcy, behind me. “I didn’t know whose they were. They looked like somebody loved the kid.”

“They were mine,” I said. “He’s the one who wrote that.”

I did not cry. I will not pretend I did not want to. I stood there with my fingers on my father’s handwriting, and I thought, in sixty years nobody has painted over it.

Marcy and Tyler sat down on the back steps with me while I got myself in hand.

“The left step,” I said, and looked down. “On the card I wrote that the left step was loose. It was awful. Mother tripped on it twice.”

Tyler cleared his throat. “I fixed it in April,” he said. “It wobbled. I put in new screws and two new boards. I didn’t know it was supposed to be a loose step.”

“It was,” I said. “For nearly sixty years.”

He grinned, shyly, at his boots.

Then Marcy said what I had been waiting, all that morning, for her to say. She took the card out of the bag and laid it flat on her knee and smoothed it.

“I have not told you the real reason I came,” she said.

“You asked me what I prayed for you.”

“That was the first thing.” She took a breath. “In the spring, I was going to sell this house.”

I looked at her.

“I had a realtor out in April. I’d spent every dime on the renovation, and I could not live in a house with Dan’s work boots still by the door and nobody to hand them to.”

She did not look at me. She looked at the card.

“Then Omer pulled the baseboard. And I read, Lord, let this house be kept. And I thought about a fourteen-year-old girl on the porch, and a woman parked at my curb every Sunday for two years, and I thought, somebody has been holding this house up for sixty years. I can’t be the one to let go.”

She looked up at last.