The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

It got back to Cleta in two days, and it hardened, the way these things do, like pudding left on a stove. She stopped coming to church. I stopped crossing the road. And for thirty-one years we lived a hundred and fifty feet apart and said “Morning.”

Every June ninth, my husband took the truck at six and came home at noon and told me the fish weren’t biting.

I had known. Somewhere underneath I had known he was not at Lick Creek, because he never came home smelling of fish. He came home smelling of cut grass and a little lilac, with a burr in his trouser cuff from the old cemetery on Boone Hill. I never asked. I think I was afraid he would tell me he sat with Cleta at her boy’s grave, and I would have to decide whether I was glad.

The black notebook was hard going, with her name in it.

June 9, 1995. A year today. Took Cleta to the cemetery. She let me drive. She did not speak and neither did I. She brought a Pepsi and set it on the grave because that’s what he liked. I sat in the truck.

June 9, 2018. Cleta’s knees are bad. We sit in the truck at the foot of the hill and look up. She says, Hello, baby, out the window. I sit and say nothing and mean it.

Every year, as the last line on the page: And Phyllis. Always Phyllis. And beside that line on one of those pages, a small addition: And Cleta. Both of them, side by side.

I closed the black notebook on that page and did not open it again for nine days.

I will tell you about the last page now, because I know it is what you have been waiting for.

I did not read ahead. For a month I had kept to the order of the pages, as if the notebook were a sermon and I the congregation. On Thanksgiving night, after Karen and Caleb had driven back to Lexington, it was just me and the kitchen clock and Otha’s stub of a pencil. I turned the last page.

It was dated October 14, 2025, two days before he died. That night I had sat with him at the hospital in Glasgow when his chest felt heavy, and he had lain there with a pencil in his shirt pocket. I had said, “Otha, what do you want with a pencil?” and he had said, “Habit,” and fallen asleep.

I had not known he’d written anything. He must have done it that morning at the kitchen table, as he always did, and then walked the green notebook out to the garage and slid it into the bread bag where he knew I would find it, hours before his chest started to feel heavy and I drove him to the hospital. He knew I would clean that garage. He knew I would do it the way I did everything, by finishing it.

The handwriting was weaker. The letters were still square, but they leaned, and the lines ran uphill the way a tired man’s do.

Oct. 14, 2025. Heart’s not right and I know it. I am not afraid, Lord, but I am not done, either.

Phyllis will find this box. She will pray the list. She is a woman who finishes what is set in front of her, and I want to thank her for that, and for never once asking me to say what I couldn’t.