The Prayer I Had to Take Back

He lifted his head after a while and came around the table and knelt on one knee in the clover in his wedding suit. He did not say a word. He took both my hands in his, and held on.

“You didn’t have to carry it all by yourself,” I said.

He shook his head, laughing, wet in the face. “Mrs. Wahl.”

“Lavada.”

“Lavada.” He tried it as though it were a tool he had never held. “I’d say it was no trouble.”

“It was a great deal of trouble.”

“It was,” he said. “I’d do it over.”

Late that night, when the tables were cleared and the fiddle had gone home, Lavon found me in the kitchen on my stool, my shoes off and my feet on the rung. The window was open an inch. She leaned on the counter beside it, barefoot, with her veil in one hand.

“Mama, I have to tell you something. He knew.”

“Who knew what?”

“Garrick. He knew about the prayer from the very first week. He told me the night before he proposed. He was stacking your firewood that first Saturday and he heard you through the window. ‘Not that boy, Lord. Not Garrick.’ He stood there with a log in his arms and nearly put it down and left. He asked me if I wanted him to step off. I said it’s my life. And he said, ‘A woman who prays that hard for her child loves her, even when she’s praying wrong. I’d rather be prayed against by Lavada Wahl than ignored by anybody else. I’ll just have to be the answer she didn’t ask for.'”

I put my hand over my mouth. I thought of the logs going quiet, and the red ears. A man who had stood outside my window hearing me ask God to keep him out of my family, and gone on stacking, one log at a time. Who had come back the next Sunday with a pie.

A whole year. He had heard it and kept it and never made me carry it.

Lavon kissed the top of my head and went to find her husband.

I stayed where I was. Out the window, in the half dark, the woodpile stood at the corner of the house, the very corner where that first cord had gone up. And standing at the end of it with his tie undone and his jacket over his shoulder was Garrick, one hand resting on the top log, looking at the first stars. He did not see me. Or if he did, he did not let on.

I leaned toward the window and did not shut it. I said it in my kitchen voice, the one I had used three hundred and some mornings to say the wrong thing.

“Thank You for the answer I did not ask for. Forgive me the one I did. And bless the hands that built what I could not.”

Out in the dusk a man’s head lifted. He did not turn around. Slowly he took off his cap and held it against his chest and bowed his head, and stood that way until I finished.

I leave the window open an inch these days, even in winter. Ray used to say it was for the steam. I know better now.

Some prayers are meant to be overheard.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.