five years younger than I am and dying of cancer gave the children’s message, and he talked all about the angels among us. He told the kids angels don’t always have wings.”
“He’s right.”
“He said they were the women who drive him to and from his chemotherapy. Who make him his carrot juice.”
She nodded. “I have readers, of course, who see angels in a pretty literal sense. When I was in Vermont the other day, I had one reader tell me that a particularly amazing angel had caught her husband’s small plane in midair when the engine flamed out and stopped it from crashing.”
“How?”
“You know, with his hands.”
“Just brought it safely to earth?”
“Because the angel had wings,” she said, as if this explained everything. I found myself imagining, no doubt as this reader had, an angel in a white robe flying atop a Cessna, holding the fuselage in his hands while flapping his wings to keep both him and the plane aloft. “As you might imagine, my books do better with some sorts of readers than with others.”
She was wearing black jeans and a white linen top, which was untucked. Her feet were bare, and she had curled them beneath her on the couch. Her toenails were plum.
“What would you be doing if I hadn’t appeared?” I asked.
“Going through the piles of mail my assistant prioritized in my absence. Reading e-mail. Grocery shopping. It was going to be a pretty glamorous Saturday.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Oh, let’s see. Today’s the first day of August. A little less than two years. I call this the Loft That
Angels
Built,” and I understood she was referring to her first book.
“And you’ve always lived here alone?”
“I have.”
“May I ask you something?”
“You seem to be asking me a great many somethings. Go ahead.”
“Do you pray?” I hadn’t meant it to be an especially challenging or antagonistic inquiry—though I did hear in my head the homonym,
prey
, and that part of me that I have discovered is capable of unexpected bouts of savagery and anger may have lent an edge to my voice—and she sat back and seemed to be contemplating the question, her eyes growing a little stern, her forehead slightly creased. I imagined her suddenly as a child struggling with a math equation that was beyond her ken. “Everyone prays,” she said finally, “even if they don’t use that verb. Even if they’re not completely sure who or what they’re imploring. Why? Have you stopped praying?”
“So it seems,” I answered, and I told her how hard I had tried that past week to connect with a living God—and how I had even faked it late Tuesday afternoon before the altar with Joanie Gaylord. I had, in truth, spent a good part of Wednesday afternoon at the church. I was either alone in my office in the wing by the Sunday-school classrooms or in the sanctuary itself trying to pray. I let Betsy or the answering machine handle the usual sorts of calls that came in—a request to give the invocation at a special Masonic gathering at the lodge in Bennington, a change in the date of an upcoming Church Council meeting,the increasingly urgent need as September approached to find a Sunday-school teacher for the third- and fourth-graders—as well as the barrage that was linked directly to the Haywards’ deaths and upcoming funeral: The mortician. A deacon. The high-school principal. Ginny.
In theory I knew a very great deal about prayer, so praying shouldn’t have been all that difficult. I had studied it at seminary, I had read all the right books. I’d led prayer groups in my little church, I’d conducted seminars for pastors and lay people in our region. And though I never had expectations of a miracle when someone was actively dying, there had been a period in my life when I had believed fervently in the healing powers of prayer. For over two decades, I had prayed every single day of my life.
Yet when I’d fall on my knees in the days immediately after
“He’s right.”
“He said they were the women who drive him to and from his chemotherapy. Who make him his carrot juice.”
She nodded. “I have readers, of course, who see angels in a pretty literal sense. When I was in Vermont the other day, I had one reader tell me that a particularly amazing angel had caught her husband’s small plane in midair when the engine flamed out and stopped it from crashing.”
“How?”
“You know, with his hands.”
“Just brought it safely to earth?”
“Because the angel had wings,” she said, as if this explained everything. I found myself imagining, no doubt as this reader had, an angel in a white robe flying atop a Cessna, holding the fuselage in his hands while flapping his wings to keep both him and the plane aloft. “As you might imagine, my books do better with some sorts of readers than with others.”
She was wearing black jeans and a white linen top, which was untucked. Her feet were bare, and she had curled them beneath her on the couch. Her toenails were plum.
“What would you be doing if I hadn’t appeared?” I asked.
“Going through the piles of mail my assistant prioritized in my absence. Reading e-mail. Grocery shopping. It was going to be a pretty glamorous Saturday.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Oh, let’s see. Today’s the first day of August. A little less than two years. I call this the Loft That
Angels
Built,” and I understood she was referring to her first book.
“And you’ve always lived here alone?”
“I have.”
“May I ask you something?”
“You seem to be asking me a great many somethings. Go ahead.”
“Do you pray?” I hadn’t meant it to be an especially challenging or antagonistic inquiry—though I did hear in my head the homonym,
prey
, and that part of me that I have discovered is capable of unexpected bouts of savagery and anger may have lent an edge to my voice—and she sat back and seemed to be contemplating the question, her eyes growing a little stern, her forehead slightly creased. I imagined her suddenly as a child struggling with a math equation that was beyond her ken. “Everyone prays,” she said finally, “even if they don’t use that verb. Even if they’re not completely sure who or what they’re imploring. Why? Have you stopped praying?”
“So it seems,” I answered, and I told her how hard I had tried that past week to connect with a living God—and how I had even faked it late Tuesday afternoon before the altar with Joanie Gaylord. I had, in truth, spent a good part of Wednesday afternoon at the church. I was either alone in my office in the wing by the Sunday-school classrooms or in the sanctuary itself trying to pray. I let Betsy or the answering machine handle the usual sorts of calls that came in—a request to give the invocation at a special Masonic gathering at the lodge in Bennington, a change in the date of an upcoming Church Council meeting,the increasingly urgent need as September approached to find a Sunday-school teacher for the third- and fourth-graders—as well as the barrage that was linked directly to the Haywards’ deaths and upcoming funeral: The mortician. A deacon. The high-school principal. Ginny.
In theory I knew a very great deal about prayer, so praying shouldn’t have been all that difficult. I had studied it at seminary, I had read all the right books. I’d led prayer groups in my little church, I’d conducted seminars for pastors and lay people in our region. And though I never had expectations of a miracle when someone was actively dying, there had been a period in my life when I had believed fervently in the healing powers of prayer. For over two decades, I had prayed every single day of my life.
Yet when I’d fall on my knees in the days immediately after
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