The Prayer Chain That Became the Diner

I sat down on a flour sack.

“Nine days,” she said. “Nine days and the first thing out of his mouth is the grill.”

It was a long road after that. The doctors said he had been without a heartbeat for something like fourteen minutes, and the cooling had done its work, but his speech came slowly and his left hand would not close. They moved him to a rehabilitation hospital in the third week.

The first three weeks ran on a kind of grace. But in the fourth week people got tired. Bev’s hip gave out. Hap pulled a muscle lifting a fryer basket and swore he would carry on anyway. I was on my feet twelve hours a day, and I discovered that Vance had been doing this for forty-one years at a pace I could barely follow for three weeks.

On a Tuesday, exactly four weeks to the day after he fell, the county health inspector walked in.

His name was Hiram. I had known him since he was in my Sunday school class. He came in with his clipboard under his arm, took one look at the kitchen, at two retired farmers peeling potatoes, a pastor at the dish pit, and nine women in three different kinds of aprons, and he said, “Doreen, who is the certified food manager on the premises?”

I said, “Vance,” and Hiram said he knew Vance was in Indianapolis, and then he stood there, a man sent to do something he did not want to do. “The license requires a certified manager on site any time food is served. I’d have to close you down.”

I could feel the whole kitchen holding its breath. And then, from the middle of the line, with a ladle in her hand, Francine spoke.

“I’ve held a food-service manager certificate for thirty-one years,” she said. “It’s current. I renewed it in March. It’s in my purse.”

Hiram looked at her. Then he looked at me. Then his shoulders came down about two inches.

“I’ll need to see it,” he said.

She showed it to him. He wrote something on the clipboard, and then he did something I did not expect. He stood a moment longer. He took off his county cap.

“My dad used to take me here for pie after Little League,” he said. “Tell Vance I said to hurry up.”

And he stayed for lunch, in his uniform, at the counter, and he ate a Grady.

I do not think it was an accident that Francine still carried that certificate, or that Grady had a key, or that Lorraine had once worked a grill. I am an old woman with no gift for miracles. But when you pray for a person for eleven years and you are not paying much attention, God may be paying attention for you.

In the fifth week Opal stopped praying again.

She had begun to sit with Vance in the rehabilitation hospital and say the Lord’s Prayer under her breath, and the third time through she lost her place and could not find it. She called me from the parking lot.

“He’s getting better,” she said. “They said he might go home in two weeks. And I’m sitting here angry. At all of you, a little. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Everybody’s being so good to us. And I can’t do a thing but take it.”