The Nine Thousand Dollar Phone Call

The Obituary

I put my hand over my grandfather’s hand. It was cold, and still shaking.

“Grandpa, may I ask you something? You can say no.”

“Go ahead.”

“Would you let me call Jonah? Not about the money. Just to hear his voice.”

He studied me a long time. I could see the argument going on behind his eyes, and I could see which side was winning, because his chin dropped a quarter inch.

“If it’s a scam,” he said, very quietly, “I will have to explain to your mother why I’m an old fool.”

He gave one short nod. I dialed Jonah’s number and held my breath.

“Tessa?” Wind roared across the phone. A truck engine hummed under it. “Hey, I’m kind of busy.”

It was Jonah. Not a stuffed-up Jonah, not a crying Jonah. The easy, slightly annoyed voice I had known since he was six and fell out of my mother’s apple tree.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Forty feet up a pole on Harmony Road in Fort Collins. Why? Is everything okay?”

“Is your nose broken?”

A pause. “My nose is fine. Tessa, what is going on?”

I held the phone out across Corliss’s desk. “Grandpa,” I said. “Say hello.”

My grandfather took it in both hands as if it were hot. He lifted it to his ear and said, in a cracked small voice I had never heard come out of him, “Jonah?”

“Grandpa! What’s wrong? Is Grandpa okay, Tessa?”

Then Emil Brungardt put his cap over his face, and his shoulders went.

In thirty-four years of knowing him, I had never seen my grandfather cry. Not at his own wife’s funeral. He stood at the grave with his back like a post, shook every hand, and drove home alone.

Corliss walked around the desk and set a box of tissues on his knee. I knelt beside the chair, held onto his coat sleeve, and did not say a single word.

When Grandpa could speak, he said, “I thought you were in a cell.”

“No sir.”

“I thought your nose was broken.”

“No sir. It’s the same ugly nose.”

Grandpa laughed, a wet, scared bark of a laugh, and handed me the phone, and put his cap back on his head.

“Tessa,” Jonah said, low. “Somebody called Grandpa pretending to be me? How did they even get my name?”

I knew the answer before he finished asking, and the answer made me sick.

I had written that name down myself.

Three winters ago, when my grandmother Ardis died, I sat at the kitchen table with my mother and wrote her obituary for the Elliston paper and the funeral home’s website. I wrote the line every obituary has: survived by her husband of fifty-one years, Emil; a daughter, Karen; a granddaughter, Tessa (Wyatt) Lund; and a grandson, Jonah Brungardt of Fort Collins.

Somebody, somewhere, reads obituaries all day. They find the widower, the town, the grandson’s name, and then the grandson’s page, where he had posted a picture of himself in a hard hat with the caption new job, new pole.

“Honey,” Corliss said, reading my face. “Don’t. They put every obituary in the county in a spreadsheet. If it hadn’t been Ardis’s, it would have been somebody else’s.”