The Wrong Number That Called Every Sunday

She said oh, oh I am so sorry to bother you, and she hung up, and I stood there holding the receiver and realized it was the first time in four days I had used my voice.

I thought nothing of it. Wrong numbers happen. I fried an egg I did not want and went on with my Sunday.

Then the next Sunday, at noon exactly, the phone rang again.

Same soft voice. “Pearl? Is that you?”

Wrong number again, I told her. Same number, no Pearl. She apologized the same gentle way and hung up.

I will be honest with you about something, and it does not flatter me. By the third Sunday, when the clock neared noon, I found myself looking at that phone.

Hoping. Hoping a confused stranger would dial my kitchen by mistake, so that for thirty seconds a human voice would say a name into my ear, even if it was not my name.

That is how low the water had gotten. That is how thirsty a quiet house can make a man.

The third Sunday she called, and I did not say wrong number right away.

I said, “No Pearl here, I am afraid. But how are you doing today?”

There was a little pause, like she was surprised anyone would ask. Then she said she was doing all right, that it was a gray day where she was, that her knees were bothering her.

I said my knees bothered me too. I said it looked like rain out my window. We talked about the weather for maybe two minutes, two strangers, one of them calling the wrong number, and then she said she had better let me go, and she thanked me, and she hung up.

I sat down at the table and I felt, for the first time in a long time, like the day had a hinge in it. Like something had opened.

The next Sunday I was ready. I had the phone in reach and I had even combed my hair, which tells you something, combing your hair for a telephone.

She called. She asked for Pearl. I said no Pearl, but it is good to hear your voice, and we talked.

That became the thing. Every Sunday at noon, for a whole year, the phone rang, and a woman asked for a woman named Pearl, and the lonely widower I had become began looking forward to that one call more than anything else in his week.

I never corrected her about the name after those first weeks. I know how that sounds. It felt like a small dishonesty, and it bothered me at first.

But she needed to call, and I needed to answer, and somewhere in there the wrong number stopped being a mistake and became an appointment that two lonely people kept with each other.

I did not even learn her name for a long while. I did not push. When a person is holding something tender, you do not grab for it. You wait with your hand open.

So I learned her the slow way, the way you learn weather, by what she brought with her each Sunday.

She loved hymns, the old ones, and she could sing a little, and some Sundays she would hum a few bars of “In the Garden” and I would hum along on my end, two scratchy old voices on a telephone line, and it was the closest thing to worship I had all week.