The Recordings My Father Left Behind

“Okay,” he said. “It’s Saturday, October fourteenth. I’m at a rest area outside Davenport, Iowa. I figured I’d try this out.”

A long pause. A truck went by.

“Lord, I’m not good at this. My wife says I talk to the dashboard enough that I might as well talk to You. So here I am. It’s Clem.”

Sadie looked at me. I kept my eyes on the phone.

“I’d like to pray for my kids,” he said. “I’d like to do it out loud, where it counts, and I’d like to do it every night I’m away from them. I don’t have a better way to be there.”

Another pause.

“Sondra first. She’s at that college. She won’t tell me what’s wrong, but she says fine the way her mother says fine, and I know what that sounds like. I can’t fix it from Iowa. You can be where I can’t. Keep her.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“Sadie. She’s got the braces and the boy with the Camaro. I don’t love the Camaro. Keep an eye on the boy. Keep an eye on her more.”

Sadie laughed, a wet and terrible laugh, and put her hand on my arm.

“Owen. The reading is Thursday. Lord, let the words come out of him the way he put them in. He gets so close, and then he stops, and it breaks my heart, and he thinks I don’t see it. Let him get all the way there.”

“That’s my three,” Dad said on the phone. “Thank You for the road, and the load, and the coffee that was not terrible. Psalm one twenty-one, Lord. You know the rest. Their going out and their coming in. Amen.”

Then a click.

Sadie stopped the file. The hallway light buzzed. A nurse’s shoes squeaked past, and neither of us moved.

“There are nine hundred and three more,” she said.

I would like to say I handled that well. I did not.

We sat in my car in the hospital parking lot, because neither of us wanted the family waiting room. It was the middle of the night in March, and the air smelled like wet snow. Sadie started the second file, and I began to shake.

I do not cry easily. But I cried in the front seat of a Subaru until my ribs hurt, and my sister, whom I had always thought was the soft one, held my head against her shoulder.

“He was praying for us,” I said. “Every night.”

“I know.”

“All that time. How did we not know?”

She held the phone in her lap, and I could see its glow on her chin.

“Because he didn’t want us to feel like we owed him for it,” she said. “That’s my guess. He just did it.”

We listened to a week of them. His voice loosened as he got used to talking into the dark. He prayed for the boy with the Camaro for three weeks, and then one night he said, “Lord, that boy got a flat on Route 9 and changed it himself in the rain. I take it back. Keep him too.”

And he prayed about the plays.

I did not expect that. I heard it in a recording from a Tuesday in November of 1995.