The Voicemail Nine Days After I Left

The voicemail was twenty-two seconds long. I listened to it in the back, standing beside the big mixer.

“Hey. It’s me.” He sounded annoyed, like I was the one who had called him. “Where do you keep Dad’s pills? The plastic thing’s empty. Both of them. Call me back.”

That was all. Nine days, and not “are you all right.” Not “where are you sleeping.” Just where do you keep the pills.

The bottles were in the cupboard to the left of the sink, on the second shelf, where they had been for four years. Six inches from where my brother got his coffee cup every single morning.

I put the phone back in my apron.

The second one came Sunday morning at 6:15.

“Okay, found them. There’s seven bottles here, Abby. Seven.” A cupboard door banged. “It says one of these is twice a day. Which is the morning one? And there’s two blue ones. Which blue one? Dad says the little one but he also said he doesn’t take the white one, and there’s a white one right here with his name on it. Call me.”

I played that one twice. I am ashamed to say that the second time, I smiled.

Then I stopped smiling, because one of those blue ones was his blood thinner, and that is not a pill a person should guess at.

I sat on the bed a long time with my thumb over his name.

Here is what I told myself. Every one of those bottles had a printed label with directions on it. Every one had the pharmacy’s phone number in bold. Mary at the pharmacy had been filling them for four years and would have walked a grown man through it in five minutes if he asked.

All he had to do was read. All he had to do was ask somebody other than me.

I did not call.

Tuesday it was the well.

“Abby.” This time there was wind in the phone and cattle bawling behind him. “The pump quit on the south well and the tank’s about dry. I flipped the breaker in the pump house and nothing. I flipped it three times. Dale says you do something to it. What do you do to it? I’ve got a hundred and forty pair standing here looking at me.”

What you do is flip the main off first, wait a full minute, push the little red reset button on the control box, and then turn the breaker back on. The pump man showed me in 2021. It was on page nineteen of the binder.

They hauled water with the tank trailer for two days. Then they paid the pump man two hundred and ten dollars to drive out from town and push a red button.

I know that because the pump man’s wife told Connie, and Connie told me while she was icing long johns, and neither one of us said a word after.

Thursday.

“Some guy named Roger called the house about hay. Says you ordered two semi loads of alfalfa back in August and he needs to know where to stack it and who’s writing the check. Who is this guy? How much is two loads? Dad says he never agreed to that.”

My father had agreed to it at that very kitchen table, with his mouth full of meat loaf, the same as he had agreed to it every August for six years.

Saturday, and this time it was a voice I did not expect.