I started with Mr. Whitlow, because he was the one I knew, and because he was the one who had cried in my kitchen. I drove to his house on a Tuesday with the slip in my hand and found him on the porch in his undershirt, shelling peas into a colander. He read it twice, in the handwriting of my mother, and then sat very still. “Overseas,” he said finally. “Eighteen months. My boy came home with all his fingers. I thought it was luck.” He looked up at me with eyes that had gone bright and wet. “Your mama was the luck, honey. All these years.”
That was how it began. I had a shoebox of slips, nearly four hundred of them, sorted by year on the kitchen table, and I spent that spring on the road. I delivered them in person, one at a time, to porches and nursing homes and one very surprised dentist. A woman in Mobile, in her fifties, told me she had been sick the winter of 1998 and had never known why she got well. She held the slip against her chest and rocked. A man in a pickup parked at a gas station read his in the cab with the engine running and was still sitting there when I drove away.
Some of the slips were short and sharp as a nail. Dale, drinking, 2003. And in a different ink, beside it, Fourteen months sober. June 9. Some were long. The Delgados, baby, safe delivery, and a second line, Twins. Both fine. Praise Him. One said only, Mrs. Abernathy, lonely. A year later, in the same ink, Now has a dog. My mother had prayed for a woman to get a dog. And the dog had come. I stood in a county parking lot, holding that slip, laughing out loud and crying at once, so that the people in the next car stared.
A Bible full of folded slips proved that someone had been praying for a whole town and for the daughter who left.
The pastor of her church, a young man named Reverend Cole who had known her only the last six years, found out in May. He asked me to bring the Bible on a Sunday. I laid it on the altar, open, with the slips fanned around it like feathers, and he told the whole congregation what it was. Nobody moved. Then, from the third row, an old woman began to hum. It was a hymn my mother loved, and within a moment the whole room had taken it up, a hundred and fifty voices, some of them shaking, some of them off key, and the sound rose up into the beams.
That night, after everyone had gone, I sat alone in the pew and went through the slips one last time. I had gone through them all, I thought. But in the very back of the Bible, folded small and tucked under the cover, was one more. It was a larger slip, written in a hand that had grown shaky, the last years of her life. I unfolded it carefully. It read: Ellen. To forgive her daddy. Underneath, in her own pencil, there was a little blank space where the date should go. She had left room for it. She had always left room.
I sat with it for a long time. My father and I had not spoken in eleven years. It was an old argument, over money and a door slammed and words that cannot be taken back, and I had told myself it was finished. He lived in a care home in Mobile, eighty seven years old, with a bad heart. My mother had never once pushed me. She had never said a word about it. She had only written my name on a slip of paper and kept it in her Bible for eleven years, in the one place where she kept the things she could not fix.
I drove to Mobile the next morning. I sat in the parking lot of the care home for forty minutes, with the slip in my glove box, and I nearly turned back twice. Then I went in. He was in a chair by the window, thin as a rail, with a blanket on his knees. He looked up. For a moment neither of us said anything. Then he said, in a voice I had not heard since I was twenty five, “Your mama told me you would come.” I knelt down in front of the chair, in my good coat, on the linoleum, and put my head in his lap.
We talked all afternoon. I will not tell you what we said, because some things belong to the room they were said in. I will tell you that he cried, and that I did, and that at the end of it he reached up with his freckled old hand and touched my cheek, as he had when I was a girl. He said, “I was a stubborn fool.” I said, “So was I.” Then we both laughed, and the nurse came to the door to see what the noise was, and went away again, smiling.
That night, in the car, under the dome light, I took the last slip out of my purse. I had a pen in my bag, a blue one, and I wrote the date in the blank space in the corner, in a different ink from my mother, the way she had always done. Today. I held it a moment. Then I folded it along its old creases and slid it back into the Bible, between the pages of Psalms, where the others lay, all four hundred of them, answered at last.
I keep a list of my own now. It is not as neat as hers. It is a spiral notebook in my purse, and I write down names when someone tells me about a hard season, and I pray for them in the quiet hour before the sun comes up. Sometimes the answers come, and I write the date beside them in a different pen. Last Sunday, a boy of nine came up after church and asked me quietly if I had a name on my list for his mother. I opened the notebook. “Yes,” I said. “There are a lot of us, sweetheart. There is room for her.”