The Voice Every Radio Knew

Kyle Brandt was crying openly. He did not try to hide it.

I remembered that morning. I was thirteen. She came home three hours late and sat down at the kitchen table in her coat. Dad made her eggs. She said, “Tom and Connie Hanley had a girl,” and she went to bed. That was the whole report. That was all any of us ever got.

“A month,” the sheriff said finally. “Nights. Starting tonight. And if Kim tells me you so much as sighed, you’re finished.”

“Yes, sir.”

The red pickup door opened then.

Walt Brandt walked with a hitch, one hip a beat behind the other. He was a lean man in a seed cap, and he did not look at his son first. He walked past him to my mother.

“Shirley.”

“Walt. You’re walking good.”

“I’m walking.”

Then he turned around. He did not yell. I had braced for it, and it did not come.

“You stood her in the sun,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“She kept me talking fifty-one minutes with a tractor on me. Do you know what she kept me talking about?”

Kyle shook his head.

“You. She asked me your name, and she would not let me quit saying it. She asked what position you played in the summer league. She asked what you wanted for Christmas. Every time I shut my eyes she said, Walt, tell me about Kyle.” His voice gave out, and he waited for it to come back. “You had a father at your graduation because of that woman. And I never told you her name, because I figured it was mine to carry. That’s on me.”

Kyle turned to my mother. He had to try twice.

“Mrs. Hagen, I’m sorry.”

“I know you are,” she said. “Right now you are. I want you sorry in a month. It’ll be worth something then.”

Gary came over while people were getting back in their cars. He looked at the pan in my hands, and then at me.

“You’re Shirley’s boy,” he said.

I had spent most of my life trying to be something other than that.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

We were thirty-five minutes late to the social.

She carried the pan into the fellowship hall herself. Half that basement had a scanner going in the kitchen at home, and every one of them had heard it. The room got quiet when she came through the door, and then it went right back to talking, because that is how people there do things.

But there was coffee poured and a chair pulled out before she set the pan down. Nobody cut those lemon bars. They ate them with spoons, and the pan came home empty.

That night I took the headset down off her closet shelf. It was in a shoebox. The foam on one ear had been replaced at some point, and there was black electrical tape wound around the band where her hair had worn the plastic smooth.

I drove it into Odell at a quarter to eleven.

I was forty-one years old, and I had never once seen the room where my mother worked.