He came to my table in a clean shirt with the package creases still in it, and set a bakery pie down and did not seem to know what to do with his hands. He said grace when I asked him to, short and quiet, and meant it, and I did not notice that he meant it. What I noticed was that Lavon kept looking at him as if he had hung the moon.
When he went out to the truck, she took my hands across the table. “Mama, I think he’s the one.”
I said I was glad for her.
I was not. I cleared the plates and stood at my kitchen sink with my hands in the suds, and I looked out the window over the sink, which faces the side yard and the lane, and I said to God, out loud, in the voice I use when I mean business:
“Lord, you know my girl. You know what she deserves. Not that boy. Please, not that boy. Close the door gently if You have to. But close it.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
After that it was every morning, at a quarter to six, with the window cracked an inch the way Ray always kept it to let the steam out. Ray used to say I was the only woman he knew who negotiated with the Lord at volume.
I did not think of it as unkind. I thought of it as love. I asked only that the door would close quietly and my daughter would not be hurt. But I never once asked God to show me whether I was wrong.
That first week, Lavon asked Garrick to bring me a load of wood, because she worried about me heating that house through an Oregon winter. On a gray Saturday his white pickup came up my lane with two cords of split fir in the bed, and I was at the sink.
I heard the tailgate drop. I was in the middle of my speech, and I said it with extra feeling. “Not that boy, Lord. Not Garrick.”
Out in the yard, the sound of the logs stopped.
I noticed it. A long quiet, and then, after a good while, the thump and rattle again, slower. I thought, he is a man past forty, he is winded. I rinsed a plate.
When I went out to thank him, the wood was stacked so true against the house you could have laid a level on it. He took off his cap and said it was no trouble. His ears were red, and I put that down to the wind.
All that winter Garrick came to Sunday dinner every other week, always early, always offering to help. He fixed things anyway. A cabinet hinge. A dripping spigot. A loose board in the barn. I said thank you in the voice you use for the man who reads the meter, and went back to the sink the next morning and asked God to close the door.
In April, Lavon came to my kitchen after school with a ring on her hand, and I said, “Well. Congratulations,” like a woman reading a weather report. Her whole face folded. “You could try, Mama. For me.”
“I am trying,” I said.
I was not. I was praying. It is not the same thing at all.