The Ramp the Board Ordered Torn Down

“You can’t afford me,” Lyle said, standing up and taking his hat. “But you can pray for that man. I’m told Odessa has the whole church doing it.”

Friday was the longest day of my life.

I took a personal day from the cafeteria for the first time in nineteen years. At the county office a clerk named Judy slid a form across the counter and said, “Wheelchair ramp, residential. That’s forty-five dollars, honey, and I’m sorry as I can be about the trouble.” I paid it in cash and walked out holding a yellow rectangle of cardstock with a blank line for the inspector’s signature. Remember that number. It comes up again.

At noon, the prayer chain came to our house.

I had not asked them. I did not understand until I turned onto Larkspur Lane and saw the cars, parked along both sides of the street all the way to the corner.

Forty or so, in church dresses and sensible shoes, a few men with hats in their hands. Pastor Cal with his Bible under his arm. And Odessa, little as a bird in a lavender cardigan, in a lawn chair at the foot of the ramp with her cane across her knees. They stood on the sidewalk and the grass, outdoors, in the full noon light, with the whole street looking on. The curtains were moving in every window up and down the lane.

Pastor Cal did not give a speech. He said, “We are going to do something simple. Odessa has a list.”

Odessa held the back of my electric bill in her small hand. She did not read loudly. She did not have to. The street went so quiet I could hear a mockingbird in the crape myrtle.

“Lord,” she said. “We lift up Gordon, president of this Association, who lives at the corner of Larkspur and Magnolia. You know his heart. You know what he is afraid of. We ask that you go and sit with him, wherever he is sitting today.”

I had not expected that. I had expected her to ask for something for us. I stood on the walk with my arms crossed.

“We lift up Opaline. We lift up Vern. We lift up Winnie, and we lift up Kip. We ask you to soften the hands of every person on that board, and to put in front of them something they cannot look away from.”

“Amen,” forty people said. Then they did it again, slower, name by name. Then a third time.

I will confess what happened inside me. The first time they said Gordon’s name, I wished him harm. The second time, I still did. But somewhere in the third round, I looked down the street and saw a golf cart parked at the curb a block away with an orange flag on the antenna.

He was sitting in it. He had not gotten out. He was watching forty people pray his name aloud on a public street. He sat very straight with both hands on the wheel through the whole third round, and when Odessa said “Amen,” the cart pulled slowly away and turned the corner.