The Mothers(11)

THREE


We pray.

Not without ceasing, as Paul instructs, but often enough. On Sundays and Wednesdays, we gather in the prayer room and slip off jackets, leave shoes at the door and walk around in stocking feet, sliding a little, like girls playing on waxed floors. We sit in a ring of white chairs in the center of the room and one of us reaches into the wooden box by the door stuffed with prayer request cards. Then we pray: for Earl Vernon, who wants his crackhead daughter to come home; Cindy Harris’s husband, who is leaving her because he’d caught her sending nasty photographs to her boss; Tracy Robinson, who has taken to drinking again, hard liquor at that; Saul Young, who is struggling to help his wife through the final days of her dementia. We read the request cards and we pray, for new jobs, new houses, new husbands, better health, better-behaved children, more faith, more patience, less temptation.

We don’t think of ourselves as “prayer warriors.” A man must’ve come up with that term—men think anything difficult is war. But prayer is more delicate than battle, especially intercessory prayer. More than just a notion, taking up the burdens of someone else, often someone you don’t even know. You close your eyes and listen to a request. Then you have to slip inside their body. You are Tracy Robinson, burning for whiskey. You are Cindy Harris’s husband, searching your wife’s phone. You are Earl Vernon, washing dirty knots out of your strung-out daughter’s hair.

If you don’t become them, even for a second, a prayer is nothing but words.

That’s why it didn’t take us long to figure out what had happened to Robert Turner’s truck. Ordinarily waxed and gleaming, the truck hobbled into the Upper Room parking lot on Sunday with a dented front bumper and cracked headlight. In the lobby, we heard young folks joking about how drunk Nadia Turner had been at some beach party. Then we became young again, or that is to say, we became her. Dancing all night with a bottle of vodka in hand, staggering out the door. A careless drive home weaving between lanes. The crunch of metal. How, when Robert smelled the liquor, he must have hit her or maybe hugged her. How she was probably deserving of both.

The truck was the first sign that something wasn’t right that summer, but none of us saw it that way. The banged-up truck only meant one thing to us then.

“Look what she done.”

“Who done?”

“That Turner girl.”

“Which one is that?”

“You know the one.”

“Redbone, clear-eyes like.”

“Oh, that girl?”

“What other Turner girl is there?”

“Don’t she look—”

“Sure do.”

“Like she spit her out.”

“Y’all see his—”

“Mhm.”

“How much you think that costs to fix?”

“Why she do that?”

“She wild.”

“Poor Robert.”

“She wild wild.”

We only felt sorry for Robert Turner. He’d already been through too much. Half a year earlier, his wife had stolen his gun and blown her head clean off her body. A little past sunrise, she’d parked her blue Tercel along some back road and sent her car rocking from the gun blast. A jogger had found her an hour later. Robert had driven the Tercel home from the police station, the headrest still darkened with his wife’s blood. No one knew what had happened to that car. Rumor was that after combing it for the rest of his wife’s things—her pocketbook, overdue library paperbacks, a ruby red hair clip he’d bought her, years ago, from Mexico—he’d put a brick on the gas pedal and sent it right into the San Luis Rey River. But a man as sensible as Robert had probably sold it for parts, and sometimes we wondered if a passing car had Elise Turner’s muffler, if her turn signal blinked at us from the next lane.

All of that, and now a reckless daughter too. No wonder Robert looked so troubled.

That evening, we found a prayer card with his name on it in the wooden box outside the door. In the center, in all lowercase, the words pray for her. We didn’t know which her he meant—his dead wife or his reckless daughter—so we prayed for both. It’s more than just a notion, you know. Praying for someone dead. When there’s no body to slip into, you can only try to find their spirit, and who wants to chase down Elise Turner’s, wherever it’s hiding?

Later that night, when we left the prayer room, we felt something in Upper Room shift. Couldn’t explain it, something just felt different. Off. We knew the walls of Upper Room like the walls of our own homes. We’d soft-stepped down hallways as the choir practiced, noticing that corner in front of the instrument closet where the paint had chipped, or the tile in the ladies’ room that had been laid crooked. We’d spent decades studying the splotch that looked like an elephant’s ear on the ceiling above the water fountain. And we knew the exact spot on the sanctuary carpet where Elise Turner had knelt the night before she killed herself. (The more spiritual of us even swore they could still see the indented curve from her knees.) Sometimes we joked that when we died, we’d all become part of these walls, pressed down flat like wallpaper. Near the stained-glass windows in the sanctuary or in a corner of the Sunday School room or even attached to the ceiling in the prayer room, where we met every Sunday and Wednesday to intercede.