He had to stop and breathe between sentences. It took him most of an hour, and Greg stood in the doorway for all of it.
After Marge died, Hollis kept her phone turned on, just so he could call it and hear her greeting. “This is Marge. I’m out in the garden, so you’ll have to wait.” Nine o’clock was when they had gone to bed for fifty-one years. So every night at nine, he called her and told her about his day, and her mailbox took it.
After two years, Greg canceled the line. He meant it kindly. He thought it was time.
Hollis kept dialing anyway. For months he got a recording that said the number was out of service. He told it goodnight, too.
“Then one night, it rang,” he said. “Some robot voice said leave a message. So I did. What did I care?”
He kept calling, and that mailbox never filled up.
“Now, Marge’s box was full for two years,” he said. “This one never was. That meant somebody was clearing it. Somebody was listening to an old fool talk to his dead wife, night after night, and that somebody never called to tell him to quit.”
He stopped to breathe.
“A person with folks would’ve told somebody. A husband, or a mother. Somebody would have called me up and given me what for. Nobody did. So I figured whoever had that phone was young, and broke, and didn’t have one soul to tell.”
“How could you know that?” I said.
“Marge and I fostered nineteen kids, back in the seventies and eighties. I know what one looks like when she won’t pick up.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“I couldn’t just tell you. You’d have thrown that phone in the river.” His thumb moved across the back of my hand. “You don’t walk up on a stray, honey. You set the food down, and you go sit on the porch. You look the other way. You let it come in its own time.”
The faucets. The taxes. The clinic on Thursdays.
“That was all for me,” I said.
“First month or so, it was for Marge,” he said. “After that, I kept saying her name so you’d have a reason to stay.” His eyes were wet, and very pleased with themselves. “But who do you think I was calling?”
Behind me, I heard paper tear. Greg had taken the phone bill out of his folder. He tore it in half, and he dropped it in the trash can, and he put his hand over his eyes.
Hollis went home nine days later with a bad heart and a list of pills. Greg came to find me at the fry station. He stood at the counter with his cap in his hands.
“He needs somebody there at night,” he said. “I can pay you what you make here. Mom’s sewing room has a bed in it.” He looked down at the cap. “He won’t quit asking.”
I moved in on a Sunday with one trash bag.
The tomatoes were real. So were the burned eggs. I learned to make them right, and he told me I was ruining them.
That first night, I went to bed in the sewing room at the end of the hall. I lay there listening to the old house tick. Then, down the hall, I heard his bedroom door click shut.
At nine o’clock, my phone rang.
I sat and watched it. For eleven months I had let it ring. I had never once answered.
I picked up.
I could hear him breathing, in the phone and through the wall.
“Goodnight, Jessa,” he said. “I love you.”
It was the first time he had ever used my name.
“Goodnight, Hollis,” I said.
We did that every night for fourteen months.
He died in March, in his own bed. At the funeral, they sat me in the front row with the family. An usher tried to move me, and Greg put one hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “She’s with us.”
I’m thirty-one now. I’m a nurse at St. Francis, and I have a little house with a tomato patch, and four years ago I got my foster license.
There’s a boy living with me now. He’s fourteen. He has been in nine homes, and he has told me maybe forty words since August. He keeps his bedroom door shut, and he doesn’t answer when I knock. He eats when I’m not in the kitchen.
I don’t push. I know better.
But every night at nine o’clock, I stand in the hallway outside his room, and I talk to the dog.
“Well, Biscuit, it rained today. The tomatoes needed it. I sure hope everybody in this house knows there’s chicken in the fridge. Goodnight, Biscuit. I love you.”
Then I go to bed, and I don’t look at his door.
I did that for eleven weeks.
Last Tuesday, I said my piece to the dog and started down the hall. I had almost reached my room when I heard it, so quiet I nearly missed it, from behind that door.
“Goodnight.”
I didn’t turn around. You don’t walk up on a stray.
I went into my room, I shut the door, and I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall.
Then I said it back.
This is a work of fiction. All names, people and events are invented.
