The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

Eventually I said, “He asked me to say something. Out loud. For him. It’s on the last page.”

“Then say it,” said Cleta. “I’m listening.”

So I did. In her yellow kitchen, with the morning light coming through a window that had not been washed since spring, I opened to the last page of the green notebook and read his words in my own voice, slowly, the way you carry something full to the brim. I read I love you, Phyllis, and I did not read it the way a dead man wrote it. I read it the way a living woman says it to someone who has gone ahead and left a light on.

When I was done, Cleta said, in a whisper, “Amen.”

“Amen,” I said.

And then, because it was what we had both failed to do for thirty-one years, we bowed our heads over the pie, and Cleta said, “I’ll do it,” and she said grace. Out loud, in her papery, rusty voice, for the pie and the coffee and the morning, and for Otha, and for Tommy, and for the road between our two houses, which she asked the Lord to see that we wore a path in.

That was the Friday after Thanksgiving, and a great deal has happened since, so I will try to be brief.

Cleta comes to my house on Tuesdays now, and I go to hers on Fridays. We read the list. She sits in Otha’s chair, which I would never have let anyone sit in, and she says the names, because her voice is stronger than mine in the mornings. I write the notes. Hettie comes the third Monday of the month and complains about her hip.

Rex came to church on the second Sunday of Advent with his wife and daughter, and they sat in the third pew from the back on the aisle, where Otha used to sit. When Pastor Tim asked for someone to say the blessing at the fellowship supper, Rex stood up from his folding chair with his hands shaking. He said, “Lord, I’m not good at this. I had a friend who wasn’t either. Thank You for him. Thank You for the supper. Amen.”

It took him less than twenty seconds. I counted. Nobody in that room said a word. They just let him finish.

And on the first Sunday in January, Karen called from Lexington and said, “Mom, I’ve started keeping a notebook.” She could not say anything else. I told her to keep the pencil sharp.

The last thing I do every morning at the kitchen table, after the coffee, is turn to the end of the green notebook, where his handwriting stops and mine begins. I write the date. I write the names. And at the bottom of the page, in the same square printing he taught me without ever meaning to, I write:

And Otha. Always Otha.

Then I say it out loud, so the house can hear. I think it likes the sound.

Some people pray from the pulpit. Some pray at the dinner table with their hands out and their voices ringing. And some sit by a creek in the dark with a pencil, and their prayers are heard exactly the same, and they love a whole town in silence for thirty-nine years.

Otha Kirsch never said grace out loud in forty years of marriage.

He said it every day of them.

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