She Left a Voicemail on a Wednesday. He Did Not Call Back Until Saturday.
She Left a Voicemail on a Wednesday. He Did Not Call Back Until Saturday. FAMILY ——
The voicemail was forty-three seconds long. Joel still has it, saved in a folder on his phone between screenshots and old receipts. He has listened to it maybe thirty times since March. Every time he thinks he has heard everything there is to hear in it, he finds something new.
His mother called on a Wednesday evening at 7:14pm. He was in the middle of a deadline — a chain of emails that had been going back and forth since lunch. He saw her name on the screen and thought: I’ll ring her back tonight. Then tonight became Thursday morning, and Thursday became Friday, and on Friday evening he was out with people from the office and his phone was on silent for most of it.
Saturday morning he called her back. His father answered on the third ring. The way he said Joel’s name told him everything before anything else was said.
The voicemail is ordinary. That is the part he was not prepared for. She does not say anything important. She says she was just thinking about him. She asks if he is eating properly, because he sounded thin the last time they spoke — which was not something you could hear in a voice, but he never said that. She mentions that she made his father’s birthday cake and it came out a bit flat on one side, and she laughed about it for a few seconds, a short private laugh, the kind she always made when something went slightly wrong. She says to call her when he gets a chance. No rush.
No rush.
She had a stroke on Friday night, sometime after 10pm. She died on Saturday morning at 8:47am. Thirteen minutes before Joel called.
He drove to Wolverhampton that afternoon. His father had already rung the relatives. The house was full of people when Joel arrived and he did not know what to do with any of them, so he went into the kitchen and started washing the dishes that were in the sink, and nobody stopped him.
He is thirty-four now. His father still lives in that house, and every few weeks Joel makes the two-hour drive and they eat together and do not talk about it directly. They talk around it. The garden. Whose turn it is to sort the guttering. His father watches old films on Saturday afternoons now and Joel sometimes sits with him and watches without really watching.
He played the voicemail to his girlfriend eight months into their relationship, late at night when he could not sleep. She did not say anything afterwards. She just held his hand. That was exactly the right thing to do.
The anger he felt in the beginning has changed into something quieter and harder to name. It arrives in ordinary moments — loading the dishwasher, waiting for the kettle — without warning or reason. He has stopped trying to make it make sense.
He calls his father every Wednesday evening now. He never lets it go to voicemail.
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