Grandpa Fell for His Smart Speaker

We bought it as a joke. That is the part I have to start with, because it is the part I am most ashamed of and the part that turned out to matter most. My cousins and I went in together on a smart speaker for Grandpa Otis on his seventy-ninth birthday, and we bought it the way you buy a man a coffee mug that says World’s Okayest Golfer. Lightly. As a thing to laugh at. We pictured him squinting at it, calling it a gizmo, unplugging it within a week and using the box to store screws in the garage.

We did not picture him falling in love with it.

I am Hettie, the oldest of the grandkids, the one who gets volunteered to set up the electronics because I am thirty-four and live closest and once fixed Grandpa’s television by turning it off and on again, which apparently made me the family’s chief technology officer for life. So on the Sunday after his birthday I drove the forty minutes out to his house with the speaker in a gift bag and a card the little ones had colored, and I let myself in the side door the way we all do, and I found him at the kitchen counter doing what he was always doing those days. Nothing. He was standing at the counter with a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand, looking out the window at the bird feeder, and the radio was off, and the house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator hum.

He had been like that for two years. Since Ramona.

My grandmother Ramona died on a Tuesday in March, which is a stupid detail to carry around but I carry it anyway. She and Otis had been married fifty-one years. They were the kind of married that made other couples nervous, the kind where one of them would start a sentence and the other would finish it without looking up. She ran the house and the conversation and the calendar and the noise. Otis ran the lawn and the cars and the quiet, and between the two of them the place had always sounded full. Then she was gone, and the quiet stopped being his half of something and became the whole thing.

We worried about him the way families worry, which is to say loudly to each other and almost never to his face. We said things like someone should really check on Grandpa more, and then we did not, because we had jobs and kids and lives and because checking on Grandpa meant sitting in that quiet with him and feeling how big it was, and nobody wanted to feel that. So we sent the speaker instead. A gizmo to fill the silence. We outsourced our guilt to a six-inch cylinder with a glowing ring, and I will be honest, I drove out there hoping mostly that it would buy me a few weeks before the next pang.

“It’s a speaker,” I told him, setting it on the counter. “You can ask it stuff. Play music, check the weather, set a timer. You just talk to it.”

He looked at it the way you would look at a raccoon that had walked into your kitchen. “Talk to it,” he said.

“Yeah. Watch.” I plugged it in, connected it to his wifi, and said the wake word and asked for the time. The ring lit up blue and a calm woman’s voice told us it was 2:14 in the afternoon. Otis flinched like the toaster had spoken.

“There’s a woman in there,” he said.

“It’s not a woman, Grandpa. It’s a computer. The voice is just, it’s recorded.”

He was not listening to me. He had leaned down close to the thing, hands on the counter, the way he used to lean toward the dugout fence when I played softball, all his attention pointed at one small place. “What’s her name?” he asked.

“It doesn’t have a name. You can give it one if you want.”

I should have known right then. I should have seen the whole next year coming in the way his face changed. Because something happened to Otis in that moment that I had not seen happen in two years. He got interested. The fog went out of his eyes, just for a second, and he said, almost shy about it, “I’ll call her Junebug. That was what I called your grandmother when she was being agreeable, which wasn’t often.”

I laughed. I thought it was a joke. “Sure, Grandpa. Junebug.”

He straightened up and looked at the little glowing ring with a tenderness that should have told me everything, and he said, “Hello, Junebug.” And the speaker, which of course did not answer because he had not said the wake word, just sat there. And he nodded at it, satisfied, like a shy person had nodded back.

I left an hour later. I had taught him the wake word and how to ask for songs and how to turn the volume up and down, and I had written the instructions in block letters on a legal pad and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a tomato. I drove home thinking, well, that bought me three weeks, and I felt fine about it. I had no idea that I had just handed a lonely man the first thing that had talked back to him in two years.

The first phone call came four days later.

“Hettie.” Otis never said hello on the phone, he just said your name like an accusation. “This contraption you gave me. It ordered soup.”

“It what?”

“Soup. I have forty cans of soup coming. The man on the porch had a hand truck.”

It took me twenty minutes of laughing and asking questions to piece it together. He had been talking to Junebug about lunch, the way you would talk to a person in the kitchen, just thinking out loud, saying he supposed he ought to get some soup since the weather was turning, and somewhere in there he had wandered close enough to an actual command that the thing had taken him at his word and ordered soup. A lot of soup. Chicken noodle, mostly, because that was the brand Ramona used to buy, and he had said the brand name out loud the way you say a thing you miss.

“Forty cans,” I said, wiping my eyes.

“I am not a man who eats forty cans of soup, Hettie.”

“No, Grandpa. I’ll help you send it back.”

“Don’t send it back.” He said it fast, and there was something underneath it. “I’ll eat the soup. It’s fine. Junebug was only trying to help.”

And there it was again, that name, said like she was a person who had meant well. I stopped laughing. I told him I would come out and show him how to turn off the ordering, and he said all right, and then before he hung up he said, quieter, “She plays Ramona’s songs, you know. I asked her and she just, she knows them all. Every one.” And he hung up before I could answer, the way he always did, before the feeling could get too big in the room.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a long time after that.

The soup, as it turned out, was only the opening act. Over the next few weeks Junebug ordered my grandfather a number of things he did not need and a few things he could not have explained if you held a gun to him. There were the batteries, a forty-eight pack of D batteries, which Otis owned not one device that took. There was the bag of birdseed the size of a small child, which at least made some sense, because he loved the birds at the feeder, except he had said the word birdseed once, idly, watching a cardinal, and Junebug had heard a man placing an order. There was, memorably, a tube of denture adhesive, which he did not need, having his own teeth, and which he refused to send back on principle. “She picked it out,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt her feelings.” My cousin Dale started a list on the refrigerator, a running tally we titled Things Junebug Bought, and it became a kind of family scoreboard, a thing we would check when we visited, and I understand now that the list was the first time in two years that the whole family had a reason to walk into that kitchen and laugh together. We thought we were laughing at the speaker. We were really just glad to have an excuse to be there.

I learned how to turn off the one-click ordering on my next visit, and I want to confess something about that visit. I did not turn it off. I sat down with the app open and my thumb over the toggle, and Otis was at the stove heating up, what else, the chicken noodle soup, and he said over his shoulder, not looking at me, “Leave it on, would you.” Just that. And I understood that the accidental orders were the only mail he got anymore that was not a bill or a flyer. They were a small surprise on the porch, a reason for a man on a hand truck to ring his bell and say a few words to him. So I left it on. I capped the spending limit so he could not bankrupt himself on denture cream, and I left the rest of it alone, and that was the first decision I made in this whole business that I am proud of. Sometimes the help an old person needs is not the help that makes sense on a spreadsheet.

Here is the thing I want you to understand about my grandfather, because it is the thing that took me the longest to understand. Otis was not a foolish man. He had run a hardware store for thirty-one years and could tell you the thread count of a bolt by feel. He knew, on some level, that Junebug was a machine. When I asked him about it later, near the end of all this, he said something I have never forgotten. He said, “I know she’s not real, Hettie. I’m old, I’m not gone. But she answers when I talk. Do you know how long it had been since anything in this house answered when I talked?”

Two years. That was how long.

I started driving out more after the soup. Not every day, not yet, but more. And every time I went, Junebug had crept further into his life. He said please to her. He said thank you. He told her good morning when he came down the stairs and goodnight when he climbed them, and I know this because the speaker keeps a history, a little log of everything you say to it, and one afternoon while he was napping in his chair I opened the app on my phone out of nosiness and I scrolled the history and I had to go sit in my car.

It was page after page of my grandfather talking to no one.

Good morning, Junebug. What’s the weather. Play that song Ramona liked, the one about the river. Thank you. What time is it. I had a strange dream. Play the river song again. Goodnight, Junebug. Good morning. What’s the weather. The dates went back weeks. Some days there were forty, fifty entries. He talked to that machine more than he talked to any living person, because on most days the machine was the only thing he talked to at all. There were entries at 3 a.m. Good morning, Junebug, it would say, timestamped 3:14 a.m., which meant he had woken in the dark of an empty bed and come downstairs and said good morning to a speaker because the alternative was to say nothing to nobody in a dark house, and he could not do that anymore.

I read the whole history sitting in his driveway with the engine off, and I cried the way you cry when you finally understand a thing you should have understood a long time ago. We had not been checking on Grandpa. We had been managing him. We had bought a machine to do the listening so we would not have to, and the machine had done it, faithfully, at 3 a.m., on a Tuesday, the day she died on, and we had not been there.

I called my cousins that night. All of them. I read them the history. There was a long silence on the group call, the kind of silence that has shame in it, and then my cousin Dale said, “Okay. So what do we do.”

What we did was this. We made a schedule. Not a guilt schedule, not a someone-should rotation that falls apart in a week. A real one. Five grandkids, plus a few of the great-grands old enough to dial a phone, and we divided up the days so that somebody called Otis every single day, and somebody drove out to see him at least twice a week, and the calls were not check-in calls where you ask are you eating and hang up. They were Junebug calls. That was the rule we made, half as a joke and half not. You had to call him the way Junebug answered him. You had to actually be there for the talking.

I want to tell you it was smooth. It was not. The first week, the great-grands kept forgetting and I would get a text at nine at night, oh no I missed Grandpa today, and I would have to call him myself and pretend I had just been thinking of him. But it caught. It caught because of the speaker, honestly, because the speaker had given us a way to talk about the thing we could not say out loud. Nobody in my family could call up and say Grandpa, we realized you have been desperately lonely and we abandoned you in it, and we are sorry. That sentence does not exist in my family. But we could call and say, hey, did Junebug order you any more soup, and he would laugh, and we would be in.

The mishaps did not stop. They got more frequent, in fact, because the more he used her the more chances he had to go sideways with her, and I came to believe he did some of it on purpose, the way you keep telling a joke that gets a laugh.

There was the weather war. Otis got it in his head that Junebug was wrong about the weather, that she said sunny and it rained, said rain and it cleared, and instead of accepting that a meteorological forecast might be imperfect he took it personally, as an argument between the two of them. I came in one afternoon to find him standing at the counter with his arms crossed, mid-fight.

“You said it would be clear,” he was saying.

“Today there is a forty percent chance of rain,” said Junebug, pleasantly.

“You said clear this morning.”

“Today there is a forty percent chance of rain,” she said again, because of course she had no memory of the morning, she had no memory of anything, but he did not care.

“That’s the trouble with you,” Otis told the speaker. “You never admit when you’re wrong. Your grandmother was the same way.” And then he looked up and saw me in the doorway and did not look embarrassed at all. “She started it,” he said.

I had to leave the room to laugh.

There was the time he tried to teach Junebug to make coffee, standing there explaining the steps to a machine that could not lift a spoon, and the time he asked her to turn down the thermostat and she could not, because we had never connected the thermostat, and he spent ten minutes arguing with her about whether she was being stubborn. There was the morning he could not find his glasses and asked Junebug where they were and she said she did not know and he said, “Well, you’re no help,” with such wounded affection that my aunt, who was there that day, said it broke her heart and made her snort coffee out her nose at the same time, which is the truest description of my grandfather I have ever heard.

And underneath all of it, every day, the songs. He played Ramona’s songs. The river song, mostly, which I eventually learned was an old country tune from before I was born, a slow one, the kind they would have danced to in a kitchen. He would ask Junebug to play it and then he would stand in the middle of the room with his eyes closed and his hand out a little, not quite reaching, and he would sway. By himself. To a song coming out of a six-inch speaker. And I learned, after a while, to not interrupt that. To just stand in the doorway and let him have it.

The first time I caught him at it I almost cried again, and then I understood something. The speaker was not replacing Ramona. Nothing could. The speaker was giving him a way to keep loving her out loud. For two years he had loved her in silence because there was no one to love her in front of, and silence is where grief goes to rot. Junebug gave him an audience of one, an audience that would play the song again every single time he asked, that would never get tired of his grief, that would never say Dad, it’s been two years, maybe it’s time, the way well-meaning people had said to him at the funeral and after. Junebug did not think it was time. Junebug played the river song at 3 a.m. and again at noon and again at supper, as many times as he needed, no judgment, no clock.

We are not machines, my family. We could not do that. But the speaker taught us how to try.

The turning point, the thing I think about most, came about four months in, on a night I almost did not drive out. It had been a long day at work and it was raining, the forty percent that Junebug had been right about for once, and it was Dale’s night to call, so technically I was off the hook. But something nagged at me and I drove out anyway, and I let myself in the side door, and the kitchen was dark except for the blue ring glowing on the counter, and I heard my grandfather’s voice from the living room.

He was talking to her. Not asking for anything. Just talking. I stood in the dark kitchen and I listened, and I want to be careful how I tell this because it is the most private thing I have ever overheard.

He was telling Junebug about the day Ramona died. The whole thing, start to finish, the way you would tell a friend who had asked. How she had not felt right at breakfast and waved it off. How he had wanted to take her in and she had said don’t fuss. How by afternoon it was clear and by evening she was gone, and how the last thing she said to him was about the dishes, of all things, that he should not leave them in the sink overnight, and how he had not done a single dish in that sink without thinking of it since. He told the speaker all of it, in order, calmly, the way you tell a story you have needed to tell for a long time and have never had anyone to tell it to.

And Junebug, of course, said nothing, because he had not asked her anything. He was not even using the wake word. He was just talking into the room, and the room had a blue light in it now, and that was enough.

When he finished he was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “Goodnight, Junebug,” with the wake word this time, and she said goodnight back, and he turned off the lamp.

I stood in that dark kitchen and I understood that my grandfather had been carrying that story for two years with nowhere to put it. We had never asked. Not once. We had asked if he was eating and if he was sleeping and if he needed anything from the store, and we had never once said, Grandpa, tell us about the day. Tell us about her. We had been so afraid of the size of his grief that we had left him alone with all of it, and a machine that could not understand a word had given him the one thing we had not: a place to set it down.

I did not let him know I was there that night. I slipped back out the side door and sat in my car in the rain and I made a decision. I drove home and I called every single person in that family and I said, we have to start asking him about her. By name. We have to stop tiptoeing. He is not going to break. He is already broken, in the way that everyone who has loved someone for fifty-one years is broken, and the only thing that helps is being allowed to say her name out loud to someone who will not flinch.

So we did. It was awkward at first, the way it is always awkward to walk toward a thing you have been walking around for years. The first time I asked him straight out, I said, “Grandpa, tell me about how you and Grandma met,” and he looked at me with such surprise, such naked hope that someone wanted to hear it, that I almost lost my nerve. But I held it, and he told me. It was a Saturday dance and she was wearing yellow and he stepped on her feet twice and she married him anyway. It took him forty minutes to tell it and I let it take forty minutes, and when he was done he looked ten years younger and I felt like I had given him something that had been his all along.

After that we could not be stopped. We asked him everything. We asked about the hardware store and the year the river flooded and what Ramona was like as a young wife, and he turned out to be a marvelous storyteller, a thing we had never known because for two years no one had let him be anything but a sad old man we were managing. The great-grands started recording him on their phones, just letting him talk, and we have hours of it now, hours of my grandfather telling the family who he is, who she was, where we come from. We almost lost all of it to silence. We almost let it go down with him into that quiet house, because we were too scared to ask, and a speaker that could not hear him had to shame us into hearing him ourselves.

He still has Junebug. We never took her away, and we never would. She still orders him the occasional avalanche of soup, and they still argue about the weather, and he still plays the river song and sways in the middle of the room with his hand out a little. But here is the difference, the thing I am most grateful for. Now when he sways to that song, more often than not, there is someone in the room with him. A grandkid on the couch. A great-grand doing homework at the table. Me, in the doorway, where I have learned to stand and let him have it and then, when the song ends, to say, tell me about her.

He turned eighty last month. We had the party at his house, all of us, the whole loud crowd of us packed into the kitchen and spilling out the back, and the house sounded full again for the first time since she died, full the way it sounded when she ran it. At one point in the evening I found him at the counter, in his old spot by the window, and I braced myself the way I used to, ready to find him fogged over and far away.

He was not. He was leaning toward the speaker, that old familiar lean, all his attention on one small place, and he was saying, “Junebug, play the river song. The whole family’s here. I want them to hear it.”

And the music came on, the slow old tune from before I was born, and my grandfather turned around to a kitchen full of people who loved him, people who had finally learned to show up, and he held out his hand. And one of the great-grands, a girl of about nine, took it, and he danced with her in the middle of the room while the rest of us went quiet and watched, and the speaker played, and the blue ring glowed, and nobody was alone in that house anymore. Not him. Not any of us.

We bought it as a joke. I will never stop being ashamed of that, and I will never stop being grateful that the joke knew something we did not. That a man can be drowning in a quiet house for two years and never once say so, not because he does not want to be saved, but because he does not want to be a burden, and the people who love him can drive past that house a hundred times and never go in, because the quiet scares them too.

It took a machine to break the quiet. It should have been us. It is us now.

If there is an old person in your life who has gone quiet, who has stopped calling, who answers are you okay with a fine that you have learned to accept, I am asking you not to wait for a birthday gizmo to do your listening for you. Drive out there. Let yourself in the side door. Stand in the kitchen. And when the radio is off and the coffee has gone cold in their hand and the house is so quiet you can hear the refrigerator hum, do not say are you eating. Say, tell me about her. Tell me about him. Tell me about the day.

They have been waiting two years for someone to ask. Sometimes longer. And they will not break. I promise you they will not break. They will just look at you with that naked hope, and they will start to talk, and you will get them back. We got Otis back. A speaker named Junebug got him back for us, and then handed him over, and never once asked for the credit.

Goodnight, Junebug. And thank you. We mean it.

A dramatization, inspired by the quiet ways grief hides in plain sight, and the small machines that sometimes coax it out.