It was something.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Iclose the show for a few days. Reruns fill the slot, and the call-in line stays dark, so there’s nobody to turn away. People in town know by now, and they keep it to themselves. Nobody stops to tell us they’re sorry for our loss, and we’re all okay with that.
There’s no funeral. I don’t give him one. It’s got nothing to do with what he wanted and everything to do with me being done arranging my life around that man. There’s no one to come anyway. His body went from the morgue to the funeral home, and into the ground. I wasn’t there. Neither was my mother. I went to the reading of his will. He left me everything with a note to do with his things as I wished.
What a sad life to have lived. To have possessions but you can’t give them to anyone because of how you treated people. A life, gone. No one around who wants to mourn you, to write a fulfilling obituary about the life you led. I didn’t write one. I had nothing to say.
Josie’s answer was to fill the house with happiness. With babbling babies, my children and friends. The noise helped. I held grandbabies. I promised to love them until the day I couldn’t. I told Noah and Paige I was proud of them. Theyneeded to hear the words even though they knew it. They’ve always known and have never had to question my love for them. Josie squeezed my shoulder every time she passed.
I hired someone to go through his apartment. To organize and catalog his belongings. All his clothes were to be donated, along with his dishes, furniture, and other household items. The remaining stuff will be put in storage until my mom and I are ready.
If we ever are.
I go back to work because it’s something for my mind to do. I hate sitting there, wondering about life. Josie drives me down the first night. She doesn’t say why. I know it’s because she’s waiting for me to break down and wants to be there to catch me.
Bex meets me at the door with coffee and a look that dares me to tell her I’m not ready. I don’t. Ember’s already at the board, headphones on, running the screen. Neither of them makes it a thing.
The chair’s the same. I put the headphones on. The board through the glass is the same. I sit down in my own booth and for a second it’s the strangest room I’ve ever been in. Then Bex says ninety seconds in my ear, and it’s just work again.
The light goes red. “You’re on The Love Line with Liam,” I say. My voice comes out even, lacking the emotion I need to do this job.
My voice comes back the second I start talking. Whoever’s out there tonight, however many more than a month ago, the work is the same. One person in a dark car, and me, and whatever’s true between us.
The first two are easy. A man fighting with his brother over their mother’s house. A woman whose kid won’t call home from school. I answer both and move on.
Then Ember’s in my ear. “Line four. She sounds shaky. I almost didn’t put her through.” I take it. “You’re on The Love Line with Liam,”
“Hi.” A woman. She stops, starts again. “My father’s dying. We haven’t spoken in years. Everybody keeps telling me I’ll regret it if I don’t go to him. But he wasn’t a good father. And I don’t know why I’m supposed to hand him my forgiveness just because he’s the one who ran out of time.”
I don’t have the quick one for her. For the length of a breath I’ve got nothing at all, and the dead air sits there, and Bex leans toward the glass but doesn’t cut in.
“Can I tell you something I haven’t said to anyone outside of my family,” I say. “My father died this week.”
The booth goes still.
“We hadn’t spoken in years,” I tell her. “He wasn’t a good father either. He was hard, and he was cold, and he spent my whole childhood making me feel like something he had to correct. Then he got sick. Somebody called me because I was the only name he had left to give anybody. And I almost didn’t go.”
“What made you,” she says. Quiet now.
“My wife told me I’d regret it if I didn’t. So I went. And he said the thing I’d waited my whole life to hear, and he said it too late to fix one single thing between us. That’s the part I need you to hear, because nobody will tell you this straight. Going doesn’t fix it. You go, and it’s still broken, and the man’s still exactly who he was.”
“Did he say he was sorry,” she asks.
“No. He said he was proud of me. Which isn’t the same thing. I’ve decided to let it be enough, because it’s all there’s ever going to be.”
“Then why go,” she says.
“Because the door only closes once. You don’t go for him. You go so you’re the one who decides how it ended, instead ofletting him decide it for you by dying first. I didn’t forgive my father. I might never. But I sat in the chair. I put my hand on his shoulder. And when the call came that he was gone, I wasn’t lying there holding a single word I wished I’d said. That’s the whole of what I’ve got for you. Go.”
For a second there’s just the hiss of the open line. Then she says it small, more to herself than to me. “Okay. I’ll go.” She’s crying. She thanks me, and she’s gone before I can say anything back.
The board lights up and stays lit, every line, and then the overflow Ember has no slots for. I take a few more. One of them is a man who doesn’t have a question. He just wants to tell me he hasn’t spoken to his own father in years, and that he’s driving out there tomorrow. His voice breaks on the word tomorrow. He hangs up before I can tell him good. I hope he goes. I hope there’s somebody at the end of that drive better at it than mine was.
For a minute after the light goes dark I sit there. I’ve said things on this show for months and meant most of them. I never once said that. Not to a caller, not to Josie, not to my own reflection. It took a dying man and a stranger on line four to get it out of me.
When I pull the headphones off, my phone’s going off. Paige. All caps: DAD. THIS IS EVERYWHERE. YOU’RE EVERYWHERE. I’M SO PROUD OF YOU. Under it, a second one: don’t read the numbers tonight, just come home. She knows me. I put the phone in my pocket without looking at the numbers.
