The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

One name tonight. Only one.

Cleta.

Thirty years I have asked You to bring her and Phyllis back to each other, and You have said wait. Well. I’m done waiting on Your behalf. Phyllis, if you are reading this, please go across the road. You don’t need a casserole. Take this page. Cleta has something in her kitchen that is meant for you, and she has been waiting to be asked since 1995.

She has a book of her own. I gave it to her the June after Tommy. I told her I couldn’t say my prayers out loud either, so I write them, and she might like to try. Ask her who is on the first page.

And Phyllis.

Forty years and I never said it out loud. I couldn’t get it over my teeth. Not at the altar, not in the kitchen, not in the waiting room the night Karen was sick. I said it in my hands. I said it in the nails and the porch rails and the mowing. But I know a woman wants to hear it.

So it’s written down. Plainly. Here.

I love you, Phyllis. I loved you at the altar, and I loved you in the waiting room in 1986 when you looked at me as if I had failed, and I loved you every morning of every one of the days between.

Say it out loud for me, would you? You always could say it better.

Amen.

I do not remember the next several minutes. I remember the clock. I remember the pencil rolling off the table and landing on the linoleum, and thinking, absurdly, that he would have picked it up.

Then I did the thing he asked. I said it out loud, in my kitchen, in the empty room, with the notebook flat in front of me. I said, “I love you, Otha. I love you too. I always did. I’m sorry I thought you were far off.” And my voice went out from under me. I put my forehead down on the open page, over his last line, and I said it again into the paper, and a third time.

When I lifted my head I felt something I had not felt in six weeks. It was not the absence of grief. I want to be exact. It was grief with a floor under it.

I went across the road on Friday morning at nine o’clock.

I did not take a casserole. He had said I wouldn’t need one. But I am a Kentucky woman, so I took a pie. I carried it in my right hand and the green notebook in my left, and I walked down my own driveway and across a county road I had not crossed in thirty-one years and up Cleta’s three concrete steps.

I could hear a television on inside, low. There was a pot of mums by the door, orange and rust-colored, nearly spent. I raised my fist and knocked.

I heard the walker before I heard anything else, the quiet rubber-footed scoot of it across the linoleum. The chain rattled. The door opened about eight inches.

Cleta looked out. She is a small woman, smaller than I remembered, with white hair cut short and the same sharp dark eyes. She looked at me, and at the pie, and at the green notebook. And I watched her face do the thing Rex’s had done. It went through a number of things, and not one of them was surprise.