The Progress of Love

they never were, usually. She felt serene. She felt as if they were an old couple, moving in harmony, in wordless love, past injury, past forgiving. Their goodbye was hardly a ripple. She went outside with him. It was between four-thirty and five o’clock; the sky was beginning to lighten and the birds to wake, everything was drenched in dew. There stood the big harmless machinery, stranded in the ruts of the road.
    “Good thing it isn’t last night—you couldn’t have got out,” she said. She meant that the road hadn’t been navigable. It was just yesterday that they had graded a narrow track for local traffic.
    “Good thing,” he said.
    Goodbye.
    “All I want is to know why you did it. Did you just do it for show? Like your father—for show? It’s not the necklace so much. But it was a beautiful thing—I love jet beads. It was the only thing wehad of your grandmother’s. It was your right, but you have no right to take me by surprise like that. I deserve an explanation. I always loved jet beads. Why?”
    “I blame the family,” Janet says. “It was up to them to stop it. Some of the stuff was just plastic—those junk earrings and bracelets—but what Robin threw in, that was a crime. And she wasn’t the only one. There were birthstone rings and gold chains. Somebody said a diamond cluster ring, but I don’t know if I believe that. They said the girl inherited it, like Robin. You didn’t ever have it evaluated, did you?”
    “I don’t know if jet is worth anything,” Trudy says.
    They are sitting in Janet’s front room, making roses out of pink Kleenex.
    “It’s just stupid,” Trudy says.
    “Well. There is one thing you could do,” says Janet. “I don’t hardly know how to mention it.”
    “What?”
    “Pray.”
    Trudy’d had the feeling, from Janet’s tone, that she was going to tell her something serious and unpleasant, something about herself—Trudy—that was affecting her life and that everybody knew except her. Now she wants to laugh, after bracing herself. She doesn’t know what to say.
    “You don’t pray, do you?” Janet says.
    “I haven’t got anything against it,” Trudy says. “I wasn’t brought up to be religious.”
    “It’s not strictly speaking religious,” Janet says. “I mean, it’s not connected with any church. This is just some of us that pray. I can’t tell you the names of anybody in it, but most of them you know. It’s supposed to be secret. It’s called the Circle of Prayer.”
    “Like at high school,” Trudy says. “At high school there were secret societies, and you weren’t supposed to tell who was in them. Only I wasn’t.”
    “I was in everything going.” Janet sighs. “This is actually more on the serious side. Though some people in it don’t take itseriously enough, I don’t think. Some people, they’ll pray that they’ll find a parking spot, or they’ll pray they get good weather for their holidays. That isn’t what it’s for. But that’s just individual praying. What the Circle is really about is, you phone up somebody that is in it and tell them what it is you’re worried about, or upset about, and ask them to pray for you. And they do. And they phone one other person that’s in the Circle, and they phone another and it goes all around, and we pray for one person, all together.”
    Trudy throws a rose away. “That’s botched. Is it all women?”
    “There isn’t any rule it has to be. But it is, yes. Men would be too embarrassed. I was embarrassed at first. Only the first person you phone knows your name, who it is that’s being prayed for, but in a town like this nearly everybody can guess. But if we started gossiping and ratting on each other it wouldn’t work, and everybody knows that. So we don’t. And it does work.”
    “Like how?” Trudy says.
    “Well, one girl banged up her car. She did eight hundred dollars’ damage, and it was kind of a tricky situation, where she wasn’t sure her insurance would cover it, and neither was her husband—he was raging mad—but we all prayed, and the insurance came through without a hitch. That’s only one example.”
    “There wouldn’t be much point in praying to get the necklace back when it’s in the coffin and the funeral’s this morning,” Trudy says.
    “It’s not up to you to say that. You don’t say what’s possible or impossible. You just ask for what you want. Because it says in the Bible, ‘Ask and it shall be given.’ How can you be helped