The Prayer Notebook in His Tackle Box

“Cleta,” I said. “I brought a pie.”

She was quiet a long moment.

“I don’t want your pie, Phyllis,” she said.

My heart dropped like a stone down a well.

And then her mouth moved at one corner, and she said, “I’m teasing you, you old goat. Thirty-one years I’ve been waiting to say that to you with a straight face and I couldn’t hold it. Come in. Mind the walker.”

I do not know which of us started crying first. I think we both did, in the doorway, with the pie between us, two old women in housecoats and good shoes, and Cleta took the notebook from me and held it against her chest.

“He told me you’d come,” she said. “Last June, at the cemetery. He said, ‘When I’m gone she’ll find the box. Let her come to you.’ I said, ‘Phyllis Kirsch will never cross the road.’ He said, ‘Phyllis Kirsch will cross the Red Sea if somebody wrote it on a list.'”

I laughed, and it hurt, like a muscle I had stopped using. “That man.”

“That man,” said Cleta. “He took me to see my boy every June for thirty years and I never once thanked him.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted it. He’d have run.”

“I know. That’s why I never did.”

We sat at her kitchen table, a yellow Formica one with chrome legs like my mother’s. She poured two cups of coffee and brought them over one at a time, hand over hand along the counter, and I did not offer to help, because I knew better.

Then she went to the drawer under the telephone, the one where you keep your good scissors, and took out a composition notebook. Black and white marbled, soft as cloth. She set it on the table between us and put her thin hand flat on top of it.

“He said to ask me who’s on the first page.”

“Who’s on the first page, Cleta?”

She opened the cover. In a slanted hand I had seen on a thousand Christmas cards that never reached my mailbox, in pencil gone faint with years, was a date.

June 10, 1995. Otha says to write it down. He says I won’t be able to say it, and he’s right, so here.

Phyllis. I’m sorry about the pie. I am so sorry about the pie. She came to my door with her good dish and I shut it, and I want her to know, Lord, somehow, that I wasn’t shutting it at her.

Forgive me. And bless her. She was only trying to help.

I read that and put my own hand over my eyes.

“There are three more of those,” Cleta said, her voice cracking. “Thirty years. Every page. I’d write down my own troubles, and at the bottom, Phyllis. Just Phyllis. I never could figure out how to say it to your face.”

“Otha did the same,” I whispered. “At the bottom of every page. I’m the last name.”

“I know. He told me. Two old fools praying for the same stubborn woman.” She wiped under her glasses with a knuckle. “We were praying for you the whole time, Phyllis. And you were praying for us.”

“I was praying for him,” I said. “I thought he didn’t believe.”

“Oh, honey.” She laughed through her tears and reached across the table and took both my hands in those thin, strong, spotted ones that had lost a boy and kept on living. “He believed so hard he couldn’t open his mouth.”

We sat there a long time.