The Wrong Number That Called Every Sunday

My name is Harlan Beck, and three years ago I buried my wife on a Tuesday and did not speak another full sentence out loud until the following Sunday.

That is what nobody tells you about losing the person you married. The house does not just get quieter. It stops answering you.

For forty one years Nadine answered me. I would say something foolish from the next room and she would say something back, and that was a marriage, that back and forth, that proof that somebody heard you.

Then she was gone, and I would catch myself talking to the kitchen, and the kitchen said nothing.

I am seventy two years old. I live in the same farmhouse Nadine and I bought when we were young, a white clapboard place at the end of a gravel road outside Delia, Missouri.

We raised our boy here. We buried two dogs under the maple. Nadine grew tomatoes along the south fence until the summer she got too weak to kneel.

After the funeral our son Denny stayed a week, then had to fly back to Oregon where his work and his own family are. I told him to go. I meant it. A man cannot lean on his children. It is not their job to hold him up.

So I learned the shape of being alone. I learned it the way you learn a limp, slowly, until it is just how you walk.

Mornings were the easiest. There is coffee to make and chores to pretend matter. I would feed the one old barn cat and walk the fence line and come back in and the whole day would still be there, waiting, enormous.

But Sundays were the worst. Sundays had been ours.

Nadine and I went to the little Lutheran church in town every Sunday for forty one years. We sat third pew from the back on the left. After the last amen we would come home and she would fry chicken and we would eat at noon, the two of us, with the radio on low.

Now I still went to church, because a man should, but I came home to a cold stove at eleven thirty and sat at the table and the clock would tick toward noon and I would just sit there, not eating, because cooking for one feels like an insult to the memory of cooking for two.

That is where I was, one Sunday last October, when the phone rang at noon.

We still have a phone on the wall in the kitchen, an old cream colored thing with a cord. Nadine never wanted to give it up. After she died I could not bring myself to, either.

So when it rang I nearly came out of my chair, because it almost never rings anymore, and the only people who call the house are trying to sell me something.

I picked it up and said hello, and a woman’s voice, old and soft and a little unsure, said, “Pearl. Pearl, is that you, honey?”

I told her she had the wrong number. I said it kindly. I said there was no Pearl here, I was sorry, she must have misdialed.