The Voice Every Radio Knew

The deputy still had his thumb down. I think he forgot it was there.

“I’m just fine, Kim,” my mother said to his shoulder. “A little warm. You sound good today. I had my scanner on this morning, and you sound real good.”

I learned afterward that Kim was twenty-two when the county hired her, and that my mother sat in the chair beside her for her first ninety nights and never once took the headset out of her hands.

The deputy pulled his thumb off the button like it had burned him.

But a radio does not need your thumb to talk back.

“Kessler Six.”

A man. Older. A voice like a gravel road.

“Afternoon, Shirley.”

That was all he said.

My mother nodded at the microphone, the way you nod at a man across the street. “Afternoon, Dennis,” she said, to nobody who could hear it but the deputy and me.

Dennis had been a deputy twenty-six years. His first winter on the job he was alone at a wreck on the state highway, with a family in the car and a long time to wait. My mother stayed on the air with him for ninety minutes that night. She talked to him about his dog. I did not know that then. I only knew a grown man had said two words and my mother’s chin had come up half an inch.

The speaker hissed, and then it went again.

“Odell Fire One. Hello, Shirley.”

“Hello, Ron,” she said softly.

Hiss.

“Medic Two. Hi, Shirley, it’s Deb. We’re up at the hospital. Brenda’s here, she says hi too. She’s waving at the radio. I told her you can’t see it.”

My mother laughed. A small real one, the first sound out of her in forty minutes that was not careful.

The deputy had turned and was staring down at his own shoulder as if something had crawled onto it.

“Kessler, State Two Forty-One.”

That one was crisp. A trooper.

“I’m up on Highway 14, and I’ve had you on scan the last half hour. Tell Shirley the State Patrol says good afternoon. Tell her she talked me through that fog in oh eight.”

“State Two Forty-One, she copies,” Kim said, and I could hear that Kim was crying and doing her job at the same time.

Hiss.

“County Highway Nine. It’s Gary. Shirl, if you need a ride, I’m four miles off, and I’ve got the orange truck.”

Gary drove a snowplow. For thirty-four winters my mother had called every plow driver in the county on the quarter hour, all night, in every blizzard, to make sure each one answered. I knew that part. I knew it because she used to say their names in her sleep.

I had my door open by then. I do not remember opening it. I was standing on the gravel with a pan of ruined lemon bars in both hands, and nobody told me to sit down.

Hiss.

“Kessler Nine.”

This one was young. Thirty, maybe. He stopped, and I could hear him breathing with the button held.

“Shirley, it’s Mike. You sat on the phone with my wife.”

Then the click, and he was gone. That was all he could do.

My mother closed her eyes for a second. “I remember,” she said.