The Reception the Whole Town Gave

So I wrote the check at my own kitchen table, with the number in words the way Arlie taught me, and drove to Cherry Street.

I do not know how long we stood in that gravel lot.

Long enough for Harvey to put his cap back on. Long enough for Lindy to say, in the small voice of a child, “Mama, I don’t care about the party.”

That was the thing that undid me. I knew she did not. She would have married him with a paper cup of punch and a grocery store sheet cake. But he was leaving for nine months, and the wedding was the one thing a young bride would have to hold on to through all of them, and I could not stand the idea that what she held on to would be a gravel lot.

“I care,” I said.

We drove away in two cars. I followed them down Cherry Street and watched Lindy lean her head against Harvey’s shoulder across the truck’s front seat. I thought about the thirty-one women of the Pell Crossing Community Church who had brought casseroles to my door when my father died. And I knew, in the plain way you know a thing before you let yourself know it, that I had a prayer chain, and a prayer chain was an army of its own.

I turned the car around at the church.

I want to be honest about what I did next.

I did not go into the sanctuary and kneel and say a lovely prayer. I sat in the church parking lot, in the clear October light, with the maples along the churchyard gone the color of a school bus, and I prayed with my fists on the steering wheel.

I prayed that Roone’s walk-in freezer would die.

I am not proud of it. I prayed for his freezer, his van, and a little bit for his knees. I said it aloud. I said, “Lord, You saw what he did, and I would like it noted.”

I knew while the words were still in my mouth that I was praying against everything I had ever been taught. I put my forehead down on the wheel and said, “Lord, I don’t know what to ask for. I know what I want, and it’s wrong.”

That was when my phone rang. It was Dolores.

Dolores is seventy-four years old and has run the prayer chain at our church for thirty-eight years. She keeps the list on a laminated card in her purse, thirty-one names, and the way it works is that a request comes to her, she calls five women, those women each call five more, and within an hour every kitchen in town has the news and someone in every one of those kitchens is praying. It has been used for cancer, for a boy lost in a snowstorm in 1996, and for the week the bank almost closed.

“Verda,” she said. “Roone’s wife phoned Myrtle, and Myrtle phoned me. Is it true?”

“Which part?”

“All of it.”

“It’s true,” I said. “He canceled. The hall, the food, the cake. Saturday at eleven, one hundred forty people. He keeps the deposit.”

There was a pause on the line, and then Dolores said, “Are you at the church?”

“In the parking lot.”

“Stay there. Don’t cry on that steering wheel, you’ll fog the glass. I’m bringing the card.”