Forty-One
Episode 1 of 3 of My Father’s Sunday Calls by Helen Abbott
“You never listened to them, did you?”
My brother asked me that in the parking lot of the funeral home, and I didn’t answer him, because I didn’t have to. He already knew.
Let me tell you who we are, because it matters for what comes next. I am the daughter who stopped picking up the phone. My brother is the one who stayed in town and took care of things. And our father is the man who called me every Sunday at four o’clock for almost a year, whether I answered or not.
I didn’t answer. Not once.
We had a fight last spring about money. I’m not going to explain the whole thing, because the whole thing isn’t the point. The short version is that some money went missing from his account, and he thought I took it, and I didn’t, and he wouldn’t hear it. So I stopped calling. And when he called me, I let it ring.
But he kept calling. Every Sunday at four. And every Sunday he left a voicemail.
I never played them. I want to be honest about that. I would see the notification and I would swipe it away, and I told myself I was making a point. Forty-one Sundays. Forty-one voicemails, sitting in my phone, unplayed.
Then he died on a Tuesday, and there weren’t going to be any more.
I didn’t touch them for a week after the funeral. I couldn’t. I would open my phone and see the number, forty-one, and I would close it again.
On the eighth night I was sitting on my kitchen floor for no reason I can explain, and I opened the first one.
It was from last April. It was fourteen seconds long.
There was a pause at the start, the kind he always did, like he was making sure the thing was working. Then his voice, exactly his voice, a little too loud the way he was on phones.
“It’s just me,” he said. “Nothing important. Just checking in. Call me when you can.”
That was all of it.
I hadn’t heard him say anything in almost a year, and the first thing he said was that it wasn’t important.
My hand was over my mouth before I knew I’d moved it.