The Voicemail Nine Days After I Left

“Abby, hon, it’s Jeff down at the bank. I’ve tried the house twice and I’m not getting anywhere with your dad, so I hope you don’t mind me calling your cell. The interest payment on the operating note was due on the fifteenth and it didn’t come over. Also the lease draft bounced, there wasn’t enough in checking to cover it. It’s just a matter of moving it out of the other account, like you always do. Give me a call Monday, would you?”

Like you always do.

Then Jake, forty minutes later, with a tightness in his voice I had not heard before.

“Why is the bank calling here? Dad won’t talk to them. He says you handle it. Abby, there’s a late fee. What’s the login for the computer? Is it written down someplace?”

It was written down someplace. Page three.

Monday it was the vet’s office.

“Hi, Abby, this is Kim at Doc Hansen’s. We’re on the schedule to preg-check at your dad’s place Wednesday and I called out there to confirm. Your brother didn’t seem to know anything about it. I told him not to worry, Abby always has the cow list printed and the chute sheets ready and the coffee on. And then he said you weren’t out there anymore?” A pause. “Anyway. I hope everything’s okay, honey. Call us.”

I sat down on the stairs to my room and put my forehead on my knees.

Not because I was sad. Because of that one line. She always.

For six years I had been “she always” to the bank, the vet, the hay man, the pump man, the pharmacy and the propane company. Every one of them knew it.

The only two people in Cherry County who did not know it were the two men I did it for.

I did not call the vet back either. I kept hearing my brother reach across me for the gravy.

Nobody’d miss you. We’d get by fine.

So I let them get by.

The one that changed things came on the eighteenth day.

It was a quarter past two in the afternoon. I was upstairs with my feet up, reading the course list for the spring term, when the phone lit up.

Jake again. I let it go to voicemail like the others.

Then I listened, and I stood up off the bed.

“Abby.” He was not annoyed this time. He sounded about fifteen years old. “Dad went down in the corral. We were sorting and he just sat down in the dirt, said everything went gray. Dale and I got him in the pickup. We’re at the emergency room in town. They say it’s not his heart. They think it’s his pills. They keep asking me what he takes and when, and I don’t know. I don’t know, Abby. I brought the bottles in a grocery sack. Please pick up.”

The emergency room was six blocks from where I was standing.

I had my boots on and my keys in my hand before the message finished playing.

And then I stopped at the top of the stairs with my hand on the rail.

I knew just what would happen if I went. I would walk into that room, and I would take the grocery sack out of my brother’s hands, and I would tell the nurse every pill and every dose from memory. My father would look at the ceiling. Somebody would say “good, you’re here.”

And by supper I would be standing at that sink again, and nobody would ever have to say one word about what was said at that table.