The Recordings My Father Left Behind

My father drove a truck for thirty-one years, and he never once saw me in a school play.

Not Our Town, where I was Emily my senior year and cried real tears in the third act. Not the Christmas pageant when I was nine and played an angel with a coat hanger halo that slipped over one eye. Not the spring musical, or the recital in the church basement where I played one song badly on a borrowed flute.

I held that against him for most of my life. I want to say so plainly, because everything else only works if you know how long, and how quietly, I held it.

My name is Sondra Ostrander. I am forty-nine years old. I grew up in Benson Ridge, Michigan, a town with one stoplight, two churches, a grain elevator, and a diner where the coffee is still a dollar. My father is Clem Ostrander. He is seventy-seven now, and this spring he had a stroke in his own kitchen.

My sister Sadie found him. She had stopped by with a casserole and his pills from the pharmacy. He was sitting at the table with his reading glasses on and a church bulletin in front of him, and he could not say her name.

She called me from the ambulance. I was standing in my office in Fort Wayne holding a stapler, and afterward I could not figure out where to put it down.

By the second night at the hospital, my father was out of danger and almost out of words. The stroke had taken the left side of his body and most of his speech. He could say yes. He could say no. Sometimes, when he was tired, he could say “Lord,” and nothing after it.

On that second night, around eleven, Sadie came into the hallway where I was drinking vending machine coffee. She was holding our father’s phone.

“I need you to look at something,” she said. “And I need you not to say anything until I’m done.”

I left Benson Ridge at eighteen and never really came back. I called my father every Sunday for more than twenty years, and the calls lasted six or seven minutes. How’s the weather. How’s the truck. How’s the back. Fine, fine, fine. Then we both said we had to go.

Sadie stayed. She married a man from the next county over and bought a house on a road we could both have walked to as kids. After Mom died seven years ago, she was the one who drove Dad to his appointments. I sent flowers and called it helping.

So when she held out that phone, I took it like a person being handed a bill.

“I needed his pharmacy number,” she said. “I held his thumb on the screen while he was asleep. I’m not proud of it. But the phone opened, and I was scrolling for the contacts, and I found a folder.”

The folder was called Nights.

Inside were files, each one named with a date, year first, then month, then day. The first said 1995-10-14. The last said 1999-10-31. I scrolled and scrolled, and then I did what I do at work when a spreadsheet looks wrong. I counted.

There were nine hundred and four of them.

“What are they?” I asked.

“I only played one,” Sadie said. “I played the first one, and then I came and got you.”

“It’s Dad,” she said. “It’s Dad talking. It’s him in the truck.”