The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

“He’s got the whole town in here, Karen,” I said. “I’d like to keep going.”

“Okay, Mom,” she said. “But I’m driving you.”

There were two names I put off.

By then I had read down the pages for three weeks, and I had not skipped a name. But two of them came up again and again, in column after column, year after year, and every time I got to one I would find something else to do. Refill the coffee. Sharpen the pencil.

The first was Rex.

Everybody in Easterbrook knows Rex. He is forty-nine and owns the bait shop at the Lick Creek bridge, a tin-roofed building with a Coca-Cola sign out front. He stood in the back at Otha’s funeral. I noticed because he did not sit, though there were empty pews. A big man in a clean flannel shirt with his cap in both hands, and I looked at his face and thought, that is a man holding something very heavy.

Otha had been writing about Rex since 1991, and that was the entry that frightened me, because I knew what I would think, and I was ashamed of it ahead of time.

Aug. 1991. Caught the boy Rex, fifteen, in the fellowship hall at night with the offering bag from Sunday. It was $212. His father was in the house with a bottle when I went out to the farm. I put the bag back in the safe and told nobody. I said to the boy, you can come work the road crew summers, I need a flagman. He said why. I said because I need one. Lord, give him a better road than the one he’s on.

Nov. 1993. Rex’s father died. Rex stood at the grave like a boy waiting to be hit. Told him he could come to supper. He didn’t. Left a plate on his porch. Phyllis made it. She doesn’t know who it was for. Lord, bless her for not asking.

I drove out to the bait shop on the Monday before Thanksgiving, in the rain, with the green notebook in my coat pocket and my heart going like a girl’s.

The bell over the door rang. Rex was behind the counter with a wrench in one hand and the guts of an outboard motor in front of him. He looked up and set the wrench down very carefully.

“Mrs. Kirsch. I’m sorry about Otha. I should have said something at the church. I didn’t think I had the right. I stood in the back.”

“I saw you.”

His eyes went to my coat pocket, where the notebook made a square shape.

“I found his notebooks,” I said. “In the tackle box.”

Something happened to Rex’s face. It went through about four things, and none of them was surprise.

“He told me he had one, back in the day,” he said quietly. “I figured he’d burned it. Am I in it?”