The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

I took out the green book, but I did not hand it to him. I read to him, standing at his counter among the minnow buckets and the rack of jigs, in a voice that did not sound like mine. I read the offering bag. I read the plate on the porch. I read Lord, give him a better road, and I read how Otha had only honked from the road the day he turned six years sober, and by then Rex had put both hands on the counter and was looking down at his knuckles.

“Thirty-four years,” he said. “Not one word about any of it. He said one thing once.”

I waited.

“The night I wrecked the truck. I was sitting on the bank of the creek with a split lip, waiting for the sheriff, and Otha came. I never knew how he heard. He sat down next to me in the dark and didn’t say anything for the longest time. Then he said, ‘Rex, I’m going to try to say something and it’s going to take me a minute.'”

He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist.

“It took him four minutes, Mrs. Kirsch. I counted. He had his eyes shut and his jaw working like he was pushing a boulder uphill, and I just sat there and waited. And what came out was, ‘Lord, this is Rex. He’s a good boy. Please get him home.’ That’s all. He said Amen and drove me home himself. He said, ‘Don’t tell Phyllis I did that. It’ll embarrass me.'” Rex looked at me with his eyes running. “I guess he’s past embarrassing.”

I came around the end of that counter, and I am eighty years old and Rex is six foot three, and I put my arms around the middle of him and held on. He bent over me like a man bending under a doorway. We stood among the minnow buckets with the rain going on the tin roof, and neither of us said a word for a good long time.

Then I pulled back and said, “He wrote that down, too. 1996. Do you want to hear it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Rex. “I would.”

Tonight I said it out loud for the first time in my life. Four minutes to get it out. Rex waited. He didn’t laugh and he didn’t look away. A nineteen-year-old drunk boy with a split lip, and he was the first person who ever sat still for me to talk. Thank You for sending me a boy who knows how to wait.

And then there was Cleta.

Cleta is eighty-two. She lives in the little white house across the road from ours, a hundred and fifty feet from my front porch. For thirty-one years we had waved at each other. We had said “Morning” at the post office. We had not spoken one honest sentence to each other since June of 1994.

In June of 1994, Cleta’s son Tommy died. He was seventeen. A boy in a pickup truck on Highway 90, a rain-slick night, a curve he had driven a thousand times. The school let out. The church was so full they set up folding chairs on the lawn.

I made a casserole. Of course I did. It was what I knew how to do. I made a chicken and rice casserole and a pie and carried them across the road, and she opened the door in her housecoat with her hair all undone, and she looked at the dish in my hands and said, “I don’t want your pie, Phyllis. I want my son.”

And she shut the door.

I carried that casserole back across the road and set it on my own counter. I was stung. And the following Sunday I said to three women at church, in a low voice, over coffee, “Some people just don’t want to be helped.”