The Wrong Number That Called Every Sunday

And early on, before we were easy with each other, I had asked her once, gentle as I could, just her name and her town. She only said she was trying to reach Pearl, and then the line went soft and she was gone. So I did not ask again, because asking felt like grabbing, and I would sooner have the call than the answer.

I did not know her name, or the name of the place she lived, or the town, or one single thing I could have used to find her.

I had let a whole year of Sundays go by, and now she was gone into the silence and I had nothing.

I sat by that phone until dark like a dog waiting at a door. She did not call. I did not sleep much.

The next Sunday I was at the table at eleven. I had my hand practically on the receiver. And at noon, the blessed noon, it rang.

“Pearl? Is that you, honey?”

I had to clear my throat twice before I could answer, because I was closer to crying than I had been since the funeral. I told her I had worried. I told her I had missed her something terrible.

She said she was sorry, that she had taken a spell, a little trouble with her heart, and they had kept her in the infirmary a few days and she had not been able to get to a phone.

And then she said the thing that broke it open. She said, “I thought about you in there. I thought, I hope that man by Pearl’s phone is not worrying.”

That is when I knew it was time to stop waiting with my hand open. That is when I knew I had to ask.

I said, “Ma’am, I have to tell you something, and I hope you will forgive me. My name is not Pearl. My name is Harlan. You have been calling a wrong number for a year.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I thought I had ruined it. I thought I had reached out and broken the one good thing I had left.

Then she laughed, a small, wet, tired laugh, and she said, “Harlan. I believe I have known that for a while now.”

She said, “A body gets to know a voice. I knew you were not my Pearl by the second Sunday. But you were kind, and I had nobody kind to call, and so I kept dialing.”

And I said, “Then will you tell me who you are. And will you tell me who Pearl is.”

So she did. And that was the Sunday everything turned.

Her name was Alma. Alma Dreyer. She was eighty four years old and she lived at the Elmgrove Care Center over in Brookfield, two towns east of me, in a room with a window that faced the parking lot.

And Pearl, she said, Pearl was her sister. Her twin sister. The other half of her, she said, born eleven minutes behind her on a February morning on a farm out past Delia.

I felt the hair stand up on my arms when she said Delia.