The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

I went into the house with the bread bag held against my side, and I did not sleep. I sat at the kitchen table until ten past three and read the last line at the bottom of every page, the one I had noticed and not yet let myself read properly.

It was always the same. Some years it was in a hurry and some years it was slow, some years the pencil pressed so hard it left a groove in the next page. But the words did not change.

And Phyllis. Always Phyllis.

Forty years of it. At the bottom of every list, after the whole town, the last thing my husband prayed before he closed the book was my name, and then he said it again to be sure I understood.

Phyllis. Her knees. Her worry about Karen. Her worry about me, which is the biggest of the three. Let her know somehow that I’m not as far off as she thinks.

That one was from 1991. I put my head down on my arms and cried like I had not cried at the funeral, where I had held my back straight for four hours because he would have wanted it.

Let her know somehow.

And I had never once asked Him to tell me.

Here is the thing about being eighty and newly widowed in a small town. You get a great many casseroles and not a great deal of purpose. The casseroles lasted about eleven days. Then the house went quiet and I started getting up at five in the morning for no reason except that my body had gotten used to Otha’s alarm.

On Sunday morning, three days after the garage, I made coffee and sat down at the kitchen table across from his chair, and I took out the green notebook, the newest one. I had not decided anything. I did not make a vow. I thought, I will read the first page and see what the town looked like in 2011.

The first name on the first page was Pastor Tim. I read it. And then, without thinking, I said it out loud.

“Lord, this is Pastor Tim. Otha says his wife’s cancer was in remission as of that June. Thank You. Keep it that way.”

My voice sounded strange in my own kitchen. Rusty and loud. I looked up at his empty chair by the window, the cushion gone flat in the shape of him, and I thought, Otha, you never could do this, and I have done it a thousand times and never once heard how it sounded.

It sounded like somebody was home.

I read the next name. Hettie. Her hip, her stairs, her pride. Then the next, and the next, the pencil notes running down the margin like a second voice, and I spoke those too, the way you would read a letter to someone who couldn’t be there. When I finished the page the sun was on the window over the sink. I did what Otha had done at the bottom of every page, and I said, “And Otha. Thank You for Otha,” and could not say it twice without my voice going out from under me.

Then I turned to the back of the green notebook, where the pages were still blank, and picked up Otha’s stub of a pencil from the jar on the counter, worn down to the width of my finger. I wrote the date. And under it I wrote: Pastor Tim. Remission. Thank You.