What They Said
Episode 2 of 3 of My Father’s Sunday Calls by Helen Abbott
I played them in order. One a night. It felt wrong to rush them, like they had been waiting in line and deserved to go one at a time.
Most of them were nothing. That’s what I wasn’t ready for. I had built them up in my head as forty-one speeches, forty-one chances he took to tell me I was wrong. They weren’t. They were a man talking about his week.
The dog had gotten into the trash again. The neighbor put up a fence that was six inches over the line and he was going to let it go. It had rained for three days and the gutters needed doing and he was not going to get on a ladder, so don’t worry about that.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said, to a voicemail I wasn’t listening to.
He never mentioned the fight. Not once. He never mentioned the money. He just called, every Sunday, and told me about the dog.
Around the twentieth one, something changed. You could hear it. He was tired. He said he’d been to the doctor and it was nothing, which is what he always said about everything. He said my brother had been by. He said the house was quiet.
The twenty-sixth one was different.
It was longer. Almost a minute. He cleared his throat twice at the start, which he only did when he was about to say something he’d practiced.
“Your brother came by today,” he said. “He told me what really happened with the money. I want you to know I’m not calling about that. I’m not angry. I just want to hear your voice, honey. That’s all this is. Call me.”
I sat on my kitchen floor and played it four times.
My brother told him what really happened with the money.
My brother, who stayed in town. My brother, who stood next to me at the funeral and asked if I’d ever listened to them.
He had known. He had known for months that our father knew I didn’t take it, and he let me go on not answering the phone.
I didn’t call him that night. I couldn’t have said anything that wouldn’t have burned the house down.
Instead I played the twenty-seventh one.
It was four seconds long. Four seconds of nothing, just the sound of a room, and then my father’s voice, quiet, like he’d forgotten the phone was on.
“I’ll try next week,” he said.
And my thumb hit play again before it had even finished.