I meant it as a promise to myself, and Hollis took it as a verdict, and neither of us said another word. Dorene was twenty-four then, working the front desk at the grain elevator in town. She was standing at the sink with her back to us, drying the gravy boat. She had been drying it for some time. I remember that, because the gravy boat was already dry.
The next morning at a quarter past five I came down to this same table, and I prayed. I asked God to bring my son home. I did not ask politely, either. I asked the way you ask when you believe you are owed. I asked for a Udall man on that farm again. I wrote his name at the top of the page so I would not forget it, and under his name I wrote the date.
I did that for twenty-two years. I have eleven spiral notebooks in the hall closet, with a rubber band around each one, and every page begins with one word.
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Hollis.
I never missed a morning. I prayed through two of Stan’s hospital stays and a prairie fire that took our west fence. By my count, which I made later, sitting on the closet floor, I wrote my son’s name more than eight thousand times.
I do not regret one of those mornings. A mother who prays is doing something holy. But I prayed one particular prayer with great force, and I never once wondered whether it was the only prayer God might answer.
So who was in the other chair all those years?
Dorene was in the other chair. Only I did not see her.
I loved my daughter. Anybody would have told you so. I knitted her mittens. I knew her shoe size. I called her every Sunday after church. But when I thought about the farm, I looked right through her, the way you look through a windowpane to the view beyond it.
She had been on that place since she could walk. At nine she was riding in the cab beside her father, working the clutch on the old grain truck with a pillow behind her. At twelve she was driving the grain cart at harvest. At fifteen she could pull a calf in a snowstorm, and did, while Hollis was away at a debate tournament. She learned the markets sitting in the elevator office, and in time she became the bookkeeper there, and knew every farmer in the county by his yield and his bad habits.
And whenever someone at church asked after the farm, I said, “Stan’s got Dorene to help him.”
Help. That was my word for her. Dorene helps. Dorene is a good help.
I said it so many times I stopped hearing it.
Stan’s heart gave out in the second week of February, two winters ago. He went the way he lived, without fuss, sitting in his chair after supper with the radio on the market report. I sat on the footstool and held his hand until the radio went over to the weather.
The whole county came to the funeral. Hollis flew in from Phoenix with his wife and stood at the front of the church looking just like his father at that age. After the dinner in the fellowship hall I took him aside by the coat rack. I said, “Hollis, I have prayed every morning for twenty years that you would come home. Stan is gone now. I can’t run this place alone. Will you come?”