The Prayer Chain That Became the Diner

I was holding the pen over the page, and I thought: we pray with our mouths. That is the part we know how to do. We say the name, we ask for mercy, we say amen and call the next woman. But where in the whole Bible does it say that is all there is?

“Be his hands,” I said, to nobody. Then I sat back, because I had not planned to say it, and my own voice in the empty kitchen frightened me a little.

I picked up the phone at 5:30 and called Francine.

“I can feed four hundred children by eleven-forty,” she said, after I had told her. She was not sleeping either. I could hear her radio. “I can’t make his gravy.”

“Why not?”

“Because nobody can. I’ve eaten it for thirty years and I don’t know what’s in it. It tastes like somebody’s grandmother and a cast-iron skillet got in a fight and both won.” She breathed out. “Doreen, what are you asking me?”

“I’m asking if the thirty-four of us could keep his kitchen open. Not forever. Until Opal knows what’s going to happen. Every one of us prays for him already. I’d just like us to pray with our hands full.”

“Pray with our hands full,” Francine said. “Lord, that sounds like something off a plaque.” I heard a chair scrape. “It also sounds right. Give me an hour. I’ll call the sisters.”

By Thursday afternoon nineteen people were standing in Vance’s kitchen with the Closed sign still turned in the window.

I had expected eight, maybe ten. But they came in their church clothes and their work clothes, with aprons from home folded under their arms. Hap had brought his own hand-held thermometer. The two sisters had brought flour. Pastor Dell stood by the dish pit looking like a man told to defuse something. And Grady, who nobody had asked, sat on stool number three with his hat on his knee and watched us from the other side of the counter.

Francine took over the way she must have taken over a hundred cafeterias. She stood in the middle of the cook’s line, clapped her hands once, and said, “Nobody touches a pan until I say. I want to see his menu.”

Vance’s menu is on the wall behind the register, and it had not changed in all the years I had known it. Breakfast all day. Hand-breaded pork tenderloin the size of a hubcap. Biscuits and gravy. Chicken and noodles on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And at the very bottom, in his own pencil: Sugar cream pie, my mother’s, ask for it.

Somebody’s phone was buzzing, and I realized it was mine. It was Opal.

She had not meant to call that second. A nurse had told her it was the kind of night when you ought to let someone else keep watch for an hour, so she had walked out to the visitors’ lounge and called me. I told her where I was, and she was quiet for so long I thought we had lost the signal.

“You’re in the kitchen,” she said.

“Nineteen of us. We would like to keep the doors open. It’s your decision, Opal. Only yours. We won’t touch a thing without your blessing.”

“Who’s cooking?”

“All of us. Everybody on the chain. We’ll take shifts. We’ll run the register, wash the pots, whatever you need.”