The Recordings My Father Left Behind

I had forgotten that my mother was in Ohio that week at her own mother’s bedside. I had forgotten everything.

Sadie answered. She was sixteen, alone in the house with Owen asleep upstairs, and she accepted the charges without asking me one question.

“Sondra,” she said. “Where are you?”

I did not answer.

“Don’t hang up.” Her voice shook. “Dad called. He called twice. He said if you called, to tell you something.”

I leaned my forehead against the cold metal of the phone.

“He says he has nowhere to be,” she said.

I said, “What?”

“That’s what he said. ‘Tell her I’m in a phone booth at a truck stop in Rawlins, Wyoming, and I have nowhere to be.’ And he gave me the number. Write it down.”

I had a pen. I wrote it on my hand.

I called that number with my quarters, and a man picked up before the first ring had finished.

“I’m here,” my father said.

I could not speak.

“I’m here, Sondra.” And then, for a long time, he said nothing at all. I listened to a diesel idling, a door opening and closing, and somewhere behind it a man breathing very carefully so that I would know he was still there.

At last he said, “Have you eaten?”

I said I had not.

“Go get something warm. Call me back when you’re done. I’ll be right here.”

So I did. I ate eggs I did not taste at an all-night place across the street, and came back and called, and he picked up on the first ring. I called four more times. He never asked why I was in a bus depot, or about school, or money. He told me about the wind in Wyoming, and a man at the truck stop who owned a parrot. He kept talking, softly, about nothing, and the nothing held me up like a floor.

Around four in the morning, I said, “I lost my scholarship.”

I heard him let out a breath.

“Okay,” he said.

“In January. I’ve been lying to you.”

“Okay. Sondra, I need you to hear me. I don’t care about the scholarship. I never did. The scholarship was just the thing I was working for. You are the thing.”

I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor with the phone cord stretched across my knee.

“My bus is at five,” I said.

“Where does it go?”

I did not answer.

“Is it a bus home?” he asked gently.

I told him the truth, which was no.

He was quiet. I could hear him thinking, the way you can hear a man think over a bad line.

“Then I’m going to ask you for something,” he said. “Ask the lady at the counter if there’s a bus that goes north. If there is, Sadie will call Pastor Marvin, and the two of them will meet you at the station in Cadillac. And I’ll be home as soon as this truck will bring me.”

I was too tired to be brave. But I tore up the ticket to Chicago, and the woman at the counter looked up from her crossword and sold me one going north, and I slept with my head against a window for four hours.

Sadie was waiting in Cadillac, with Pastor Marvin beside his church van and a paper cup of hot chocolate. She did not say a word. She hugged me so hard my ribs hurt.