The Waltz I Could Only Feel

There was a rush of sound, too much of it, and I flinched. The clock over the stove ticked like a hammer. The refrigerator hummed. My own breathing, which I had not heard in years, was loud as a bellows. For a minute the old loneliness came down on me hard, the sound of a house with one man in it.

And then, under all of it, I heard the phone ring.

It was in the other room. I had not heard the phone ring in the other room since the summer of 2024. I went and picked it up, and it was Wesley, and he said, “Dad? You picked up on the second ring. You never pick up on the second ring.”

“I heard it,” I said.

There was a long silence on the line.

“You heard it ring,” said my son.

“From the other room.”

I heard him breathe out. I heard him, at forty-nine, set the phone against his chest for a moment, and then I heard him come back and say, in a voice I had not heard in a long while, “Dad. Have you got the hearing aids in?”

“I do.”

“Good,” Wesley said. “That’s good, Dad. How is it?”

“Loud,” I said. “It’s loud.”

The Next Friday

Next Friday, the twentieth, there is another dance.

I am going to put on my plaid shirt and my good boots. I am going to wear the hearing aids in, for the first time in front of anyone. I do not know what I will hear. It may be a great deal of noise. It may be the whole band, every note of the accordion for the first time in years, and a hall full of people talking at once, and it may be too much.

But I would like to hear her laugh.

I have never heard Gerda Stromberg laugh. I have seen it come up behind her hand, and I have been told by Odell Tennant that it is a good one, a rolling, short-winded laugh, like a pump that takes two pulls to catch. I want to hear it with my own good ear.

There is a thing my wife used to say when I lost the count. She would say it in my ear, low, so nobody on the floor would know. She would say, “I’ve got you.”

It was what she was saying with her fingers. I had not understood, until a woman I hardly knew said it to me with the same three taps, that the thing Dolores gave me for twenty-six years was not a rhythm. It was company.

I put my own papers in order on a Monday morning in November, with my son’s name on one page and a good woman’s name on none of them. It cost the two of us $72 in fees and a borrowed pen. It bought me the thing I could not buy at the elevator or the audiologist or the bank. It bought me the end of a whisper.

I am seventy-six. When the Lord calls me, my land will go to Wesley, and Gerda’s will go to her Sheryl, and neither of them will have to explain a thing to anybody. That is how I would like it.

I mean to listen to the band.