The Prayer Chain That Became the Diner

At 6:52 on a Tuesday morning in September, Vance stopped in the middle of flipping two eggs, set his spatula down on the flat-top as carefully as a man setting down a sleeping baby, and said, “Doreen, I don’t feel right.”

Then he folded.

I was in the corner booth where I have sat every Tuesday for eleven years, with my coffee and my spiral notebook and my church’s prayer chain list, which I keep the way some women keep a garden. I did not decide to move. I was simply on my feet, and then I was on the other side of the counter, and Vance was on the black rubber mat behind the grill with his cap knocked off. His face was a color I had only seen once before, on my husband Lyle.

“Call it in,” Francine said.

Francine had been on a stool at the counter, and she was over the pass-through before I could answer. She ran the school cafeteria for thirty-one years, and she took the Red Cross class every other spring, because she said a woman who feeds four hundred children a day ought to know what to do if one of them chokes. She knelt on that mat in her good church slacks, laced her hands together on Vance’s chest, and began to count out loud.

I called. My voice came out calm, which surprised me. The woman on the line told me the ambulance was fifteen minutes out, because that is how far it is from the county seat to Dunbar, Indiana, and she told me to keep Francine going.

Opal was in the little office behind the kitchen doing the weekly books. I heard her chair hit the wall. She came through the door with a pencil still in her hand, and she did not scream. She just said, “Vance,” once, very quietly, the way you say a name to wake someone, and then she knelt on the other side of him and took his hand.

Grady took the eggs off.

I did not understand why that mattered until much later. Grady is seventy-nine and has sat on stool number three at that counter for as long as I have been an adult, and I do not believe he had once stood on the cook’s side of it. In the middle of all the noise and counting, he reached across the pass-through, found the knob under the flat-top, and turned the burner off. Then he stood there with his hand on it, because it was the one thing in the room he knew how to do.

Francine counted for fourteen minutes. She switched hands twice. A trucker who had been working on a short stack stood against the wall with his cap in both fists. When the ambulance finally backed up to the door, the men took Vance out on a board, and Opal rode with him, and Francine sat down on the kitchen floor with her slacks ruined and her arms shaking. Grady stood over the cold flat-top with two eggs on it, gone hard as buttons.

I went back to the corner booth, opened my notebook, and started making calls.

Dunbar Community Church has had a prayer chain since before I was born. It is a list of thirty-four names, and I have kept it for eleven years, ever since Lyle died and Pastor Dell said a woman who has been through that ought to be the one holding the phone. When somebody needs praying for, I call the first name. She prays, then calls the second, and so on down the line, until the last woman calls me back and I know the whole thing went around.