The Wrong Number That Called Every Sunday

The photograph was old, black and white, scalloped edges. Two little girls in Sunday dresses standing in front of this very farmhouse, before the maple grew tall, squinting into the sun. Identical faces. Twins. One of them had her arm around the other.

On the back, in a careful old hand, it said: Pearl and Alma, Easter.

And the letter. The letter was sealed in an envelope, and on the front, in that same careful hand, Pearl’s hand, it said: For my sister Alma, if she ever comes.

I sat down on the cold bedroom floor and I held that envelope and I understood what my wife had done.

Pearl Hollister had made her peace long before she died. She had forgiven her sister years and years ago, had written it all down in a letter, and had given that letter to the one person she trusted most on this earth, my Nadine, and said: if Alma ever comes looking, if she ever reaches out, see that she gets this.

And Nadine had tried. I pieced it together later, from an old notebook in the chest. Nadine had tried for years to find Alma Dreyer, had written letters that came back, had called information in three states, and had never found her, because Alma had moved and moved again, the way a restless, grieving person does.

So Nadine had kept the letter safe. Kept it waiting. Kept faith with her dead friend that someday, somehow, Alma would come, and the words would reach her.

And then Nadine died, and the letter went into the cedar chest with the rest of her faithful heart, and it waited there in the dark while two towns away an old woman started dialing a sixty year old number every Sunday at noon.

I am not a man who sees signs easily. I am a practical man. I fix fences and balance a checkbook and I do not go looking for the hand of God in my cornflakes.

But I knelt on that floor with the letter in my hands and I could not call it anything but what it was.

That call had to come to this number, because this is where the letter was. It had to come to a man lonely enough to answer a wrong number for a year, because a busy man would have hung up the first Sunday.

It had to wait until Alma’s own heart got tired enough to make her finally dial, and until my own grief had softened enough that I could open that cedar chest at last.

Every piece of it had to be exactly as broken as it was, in exactly the order it broke, for that letter to find its way home.

I called Pastor Nilsson that evening. I am not much for asking help, but I did not trust myself with something this large, and I wanted to do it right.

I told him the whole thing. He was quiet a long while on his end. Then he said, “Harlan, I have preached forty years on the Lord working in ways we cannot see, and I will tell you, I do not often get to watch it happen on a Sunday afternoon in my own congregation’s kitchen.”

He said, go to her. Do not do this over the telephone. Some things a person has to be handed, and some words a person has to have somebody in the room for.