The phone lit up on the oilcloth at 4:14 in the afternoon. Isaiah 41:10 sat right there in the middle of the church ladies prayer chain thread: Fear you not; for I am with you. A woman who prays and knows the Lord is with her will never be defeated, and if you are that woman, anchor with AMEN. Your breakthrough is coming! Dear God, please open every door for those who share this message and offer an AMEN. I looked at the little glass screen and then I looked at the kitchen counter where the stack of red-stamped envelopes had been sitting since Tuesday morning.
My husband Wayne had been out in the barn since noon pretending to fix the mower deck on the John Deere, though we both knew the bearings had seized up clear back in August and we didn’t have the sixty-four dollars for the part anyway. We had been married twenty-eight years this coming November, and for twenty-seven of them I thought piety was the same thing as solvency. You keep your head down, you put ten percent in the tin plate every Sunday morning even if the check is stretching thin, and the Lord provides a way through the winter. That was what my mama told me when the bank foreclosed on her daddy’s cotton acreage outside Lubbock back in sixty-two. She said a praying woman never starves.
Except she did starve, technically speaking, during that bad spring when the diabetes took her feet and the county hospital had to write off the bill.
I didn’t want to think about Mama’s feet while the sun was going down behind the windmill, but the thought came anyway because the smell of fried ham and red beans wasn’t coming from the stove tonight. There wasn’t any ham. There was half a bag of pinto beans in the pantry that had been in there since we cleared out my sister’s place in Tulia, and half a jar of store-brand lard.
Wayne came through the back screen door with that heavy, dragging step he had ever since his knee went out at the grain elevator. He didn’t take off his mud-caked boots. He never took them off anymore, like he didn’t care about the yellow linoleum I spent two hours scrubbing on Monday. He dropped his greasy cap on the chair and stared out the window toward the water tank.
“You see that text from Brenda yet?” he asked. His voice sounded like gravel shifting under a truck tire.
“I saw it,” I said. My hands stayed flat on the table, right beside the phone.
“Well?”
“Well what, Wayne?”
“Did you send the amen?”
I looked at him then. Really looked at him. His flannel shirt was torn at the left shoulder where he caught it on a barbed wire fence back when we still had cattle to worry about, and his hair was sticking up in gray tufts that looked like sheep’s wool. He had that look he always got when the feed store called about the open account, that tight, pinched look around his nose where he pretended he didn’t know we were three months behind on the property tax.
“No,” I told him. “I didn’t send it.”
Wayne stopped with his hand on the back of the chair. The wood gave a dry little pop. “Why not? Brenda’s just trying to keep the spirit up. Half the ladies in the district already answered.”
“Because the electric company doesn’t take amen for payment,” I said. It came out flatter than I meant it to. Not loud, just hard, like dropping a cedar shingle onto frozen ground.
He didn’t yell. Wayne wasn’t a yelling man, which sometimes felt worse than if he’d just let loose and thrown something across the room. He just let out a long, dry breath that smelled like stale Lucky Strikes and black coffee. “You think I don’t know that, Clara? You think I like sitting out there in the dark with a busted tractor pretending I’m fixing something when I know damn well the bank’s going to stick a notice on the front gate by Friday?”
“You could have told me about the second mortgage six months ago,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake once. That surprised me. I thought for sure I’d start crying the minute I said it out loud, but there wasn’t any water left in me for tears. We used it all up when the truck broke down outside of Amarillo back in July.
“The bank said they’d work with us,” Wayne muttered, looking down at his boots.
“The bank doesn’t work with anybody, Wayne. You know that. My daddy told you that before we even walked down the aisle at First Baptist.”
The room got quiet then, the kind of heavy, thick quiet where you can hear the pilot light on the stove clicking every few seconds. Outside, a pickup truck went down the county road, tires throwing up small stones against the culvert. I reached out and picked up the phone. The screen had gone dark, saving battery, but I could still see my own reflection in the black glass looking back at me with tired eyes and graying hair pulled back in a messy clip.
Wayne didn’t sit down. He turned back toward the screen door like he was going to go back out to the dark barn where nothing was broken except everything.
“Brenda’s just trying to help,” he said again, softer this time, like he was talking to himself more than me.
“Help isn’t a text message, Wayne,” I said. “Help is a check for twelve hundred dollars and a sack of groceries that isn’t dented cans from the salvage store.”
He stopped with his hand on the latch. He didn’t look back. “Well,” he said, “the Lord provides in His own time.”
“Maybe He does,” I said, and I set the phone face down right on top of the past-due notice. “But I reckon He expects us to look at the gas meter first.”
The latch clicked. The screen door banged shut behind him, the old spring whining like it always did when it needed oiling. I stayed right there at the table in the growing dark, listening to the wind start up across the flat fields, blowing dust against the south window where the screen had a hole the size of a fist. I didn’t send the amen. I didn’t pick the phone back up when it buzzed three minutes later with another notice from the prayer chain about claiming your harvest. The kitchen stayed cold, and the beans stayed in the bag, and the wind just kept blowing through the dark.
