The Prayer Card Behind the Baseboard

“I called the realtor on Monday. I canceled the listing.”

I had no words. I heard a bird on the clothesline, a plain brown sparrow, and I heard my own breath.

“So here is what I wanted to ask you,” she said. “I mean the real thing, the second thing.”

“All right.”

“I do not know how to pray, Mrs. Nagel. I used to. Before Dan. I’ve said I’m fine to the pastor for two years, and I stopped saying anything to anyone else. I’d like you to teach me. Or sit with me while I try. On Sundays. In the house, not in the car.”

She held out the card, and I saw that her hand was shaking.

“You prayed for all of us. For sixty years. And not one of those people ever knew, and not one of them ever thanked you, and not one of them ever sat with you.”

“I did not need thanks,” I said.

“I know you didn’t,” she said. “That’s the whole trouble.”

I took the card from her. It weighed nothing at all. I read my own writing slowly, the way you read a letter from someone you used to be.

Be kind in it. I am going to pray for you every night.

I had done that, for sixty years, with nothing to show for it but a notebook in a cedar chest.

I started to tell her about my eyes. I did not mean to. It came up out of me like water.

I told her about the doctor in Huron. I told her I would not have the Buick after August, and that this was my last summer on Cedar Street. I said it was not a thing I was sorry for, exactly, only that I could not see how I would go on keeping her.

“I would have had to do it from my kitchen chair,” I said. “Two miles away. With the notebook on the table.”

“You would not,” said Marcy.

She did not say it gently. She said it the way my mother used to say a thing was settled.

“I have a truck and a Sunday afternoon. We have a front room, and a coffeepot, and a hall with a rocker that Omer says he can put right by the window.” She wiped her face. “And that is the end of that.”

“I could not impose,” I said.

“Mrs. Nagel.” She almost laughed. “You have been sitting on my curb for two years.”

Tyler said, from the step, with the greatest seriousness, “I can drive you, ma’am. I mean, with Mom. We have a truck.”

I looked at the two of them, a widow and a boy with a haircut, and I thought of the row of Ladies Aid women lined up to hold Tina’s baby. Prayer has hands, I thought, and they are usually somebody else’s.

And I understood, sitting on those steps, that I had been waiting my entire life to find out whose hands would be mine.

We put the card back that afternoon.

I did not want it in a drawer or a frame. Marcy had thought the same. We sat on the hall floor with Omer, who had come by with a coffee and was pretending very hard that he had no feelings.

I wrote a second card, on a fresh blank one from the funeral home. Marcy had called the director and asked him for one, and he had brought it in person, the son of the man who had buried my father, who remembered me.