His voice slow and rough. “I called you a while back. You gave me some advice. About my son.”
“I remember it.” I keep my voice as level as possible. “You asked me how a man makes amends.”
“You told me to show up. Tell the truth. Skip the excuses.” His breath drags on the words. “Take the no, if it comes back a no.”
“I did.”
“I haven’t managed the showing up.”
“Then it’s still just something you think about,” I say. “It doesn’t count until he can watch your face while you say it.”
“It’s not simple. Not from where I’m sitting.”
“It never is. But it’s not impossible, and you know it. You’re calling it complicated, so you don’t have to do the hard part. You keep waiting for the perfect way to say it, and there isn’t one. There’s just walking up and saying it. Nobody feels ready. You go anyway.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not easy. Easy and simple aren’t the same thing, and you know that better than most.”
There’s a version of tonight where I lean into this microphone and tell everybody listening exactly who’s on the other end of my line, and what he did, and how long it took me to stop bracing for him to knock on my door.
There’s a version where I hang up mid-sentence and let the dead air say everything I’m feeling.
I don’t do either.
I keep my voice steady, like I would with any other caller even though holding back is the hardest work I’ve done in this chair. Sterling doesn’t deserve my patience.
Or my words.
He’s quiet. Yet, I can hear him breathing, starting and stopping, the same as the first time he called. “I’m running short on the time to get it right.”
I don’t say anything.
“Then you’ve got none to waste on a radio show,” I say. “You had my answer the first time you called. Advice isn’t what’s been stopping you.”
“No.” The word barely makes it out of him. “It wasn’t.”
“So here it is again,” I say. “And then I’ve got a board full of people who called for their own reasons. Get up and go find him.Whoever he is, wherever he ended up. Do it while you’ve still got the legs to walk through the door. That’s all I’ve got for you tonight.”
A long breath on the line. “Thank you.”
He doesn’t hang up. For a second neither of us does. Then the line goes soft, and it’s gone. I sit with the dead line in my ear a second too long, my breathing somewhat labored. I hate that I gave Sterling that advice because he doesn’t need to come find me. I refuse to give that man any peace or absolution. He made his choices, and I made mine.
SEVENTEEN
It’s been the better part of a week, and I can’t get that call out of my head. I hear it in the truck. I hear it at a family dinner, with a grandbaby on my knee and my son halfway through a story I miss the end of. I know Josie’s watching. She’s always paying attention but giving me the grace to work through the thoughts going through my mind.
It’s not that I think about him on purpose. He turns up when I least expect it. A red light. The stretch of dark road between the studio and home. The half second before sleep, after I’ve kissed my wife goodnight. For thirty years, he’s watched me from the sidelines, which was where he needed to stay. Now, I’ve opened myself up to hearing his voice because there’s no way to stop him from calling in. Even if Bex tried, something tells me Sterling would find a way.
The call isn’t the only thing weighing heavily on me this week. There was the morning Noah pulled me out to the water tower to paint over my daughter’s name on the side of it, under a word I won’t repeat, Nick in his scrubs helping me do it. We all agreed not to tell Paige. I don’t know if I agree, but it is what it is. What good comes from telling her? It would only hurt her feelings.
Ever since our first live video, any clip Paige posts goes viral. I’m told this is a good thing as it boosts our marketability. Ben says we now have people calling and wanting to pay us to advertise. So, even though I’d like to stop with the live broadcasts, we can’t. It’s putting money in my producer’s pocket and building a solid foundation for her career. I’m not taking that way from Bex. She had an idea, knew how to execute it, and now it’s thriving.
It still blows my mind that people call-in and tell me about their lives and trust me to give them back something useful, and I do, and as it turns out I’m good at it. Really good at it. Until it’s my turn. Every night this week I’ve driven home from being good at dishing advice and sat in my driveway, unable to take one word of my own guidance.
Tonight a woman calls about her father. He walked out when she was a kid and she hasn’t heard from him since. Now word’s got around that he’s sick, and she wants to know if it makes her a bad person that she feels nothing. I tell her no. She doesn’t owe a stranger her grief because they share a last name and DNA. The nothing she feels is an answer too, and she’s allowed to.
I hang up a hypocrite.
