The Prayer Chain That Became the Diner

Opal called at noon from a hospital in Indianapolis, ninety minutes from Dunbar. They had flown Vance there from the county seat. He was on a machine that cooled him down on purpose, she said, to protect his brain, and he would stay that way a day and then they would slowly warm him and see.

“They won’t know anything till the weekend,” she said. “Doreen, listen. I need to tell you something and I need you not to argue.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to close the diner Friday.”

I did not argue. I could hear how tired she was.

“I can’t leave him and I can’t run a grill,” she said. “I have run the front for forty-one years and I have never once cooked a thing in that kitchen. Vance wouldn’t let me. He said I’d get in his way.” She laughed, a terrible small laugh. “I have a sign in the drawer already. I wrote it years ago, the last time he had a scare. It says Closed for Family. I just never thought I’d hang it.”

“Opal,” I said.

“There’s something else.” Her voice dropped. “We live on that diner. There isn’t any other income. If I close a week, then two weeks, then I don’t know. The hospital will want its money. And I can’t even do the praying part right now. I just sit here and watch the machine.”

“I have to tell you something too,” I said. “I broke the quiet page. I called the whole chain on Tuesday. Every one of them knows.”

I heard her breathe out. “I’d have done the same,” she said. “I’m glad. I think I’m glad.”

I did not sleep Wednesday night. I sat at my kitchen table with the notebook and the list, one lamp on, and I was angry at God in a quiet, foolish, old-lady way, which is the only way I know how to be angry at Him.

I said it out loud. I said, “Lord, we have prayed for this man for eleven years, and now his heart has stopped, and his wife is going to hang a sign in a window. What exactly are we supposed to do with that?” I did not hear anything back, not in any way you would put in a bulletin. But I looked down at the list, and I began to read it like a woman reading it for the first time.

Bev. Alta. Linda. Francine, who had run a kitchen for thirty-one years. Ivan. Pastor Dell, who could not boil water but could carry a tray. A retired farmer named Hap who ran the fryers at the county fair every August. Two sisters who baked for every church supper in three townships. Lorraine, who had once been a short-order cook in Terre Haute before she married and became respectable. Half of these people ate at Vance’s counter three times a week.

I thought of the school breakfasts. Vance put a jar on the register for children whose families could not pay, and I would swear on my Bible that he emptied it out of his own pocket whenever it ran short. He saw me see him once, and he said, “If you tell Opal, I’ll put pepper in your coffee.”

Here was the thing I had not understood. I had thought of the chain as thirty-four people who prayed for a man. And all the while, it was thirty-four people he had already been feeding, one way or another, for thirty years.