The cassette had two sides, and I had only ever played the first. On the second, after the song my husband had sung to me on our wedding night, came a click, a long hiss, and then the voice of my son Steve on a telephone line, speaking from the far end of a bad connection. I sat at the small table in the day room of the fourth floor of Maple Court, with the old tape player in front of me and my granddaughter Kaitlyn holding my other hand, and I listened to my own son say that he would not be coming.
The recording was from the spring of 2019, three weeks before the funeral of my husband Walter. I had forgotten the call, or rather I had hidden it from myself. Walter had taped it on his little machine as he sat by the phone in the hospital room, hoping for good news. What came out of the speaker was Steve, saying in a flat, bored voice, “Dad, I cannot get away. Tell Mom I will call next month.” Then Walter laughing, softly. “That is fine, son. We understand.”
Kaitlyn was crying before the tape ended. I could feel her fingers shaking. I reached over and turned off the machine. For a time I said nothing, because there are moments in a long life when words are only noise. The nurses moved quietly around us. Out in the hall, someone was pushing a cart. I looked at the girl beside me, twenty two years old, home from college for the weekend, and I thought about what a terrible thing it was to be handed in a single afternoon.
A mother can forgive a son who failed her, but she cannot easily forgive the thought that he failed the man who loved him without being asked.
“Grandma, I am so sorry,” Kaitlyn whispered. “I did not know Dad said that. I swear I did not know.” I told her she had nothing to be sorry for. I told her that Steve had made his own choices, and that I had made mine, too, by keeping quiet for years rather than demanding that he come. We sat in the day room until the light on the carpet moved from gold to gray. Then she said, very softly, “Grandma, would you like to dance?”
I laughed, because it seemed such an absurd thing to say. I was eighty one years old, with a new hip and a walker with tennis balls on its feet. But she was already on her feet, holding out her hands, and she had put the first side of the tape back into the machine. The song that Walter had sung began to play, an old one, slow and sweet, about a house on a hill. I let her pull me up from the chair. I felt the floor under me and the strength of her arms.
We moved very slowly. She held me up, and I held on to her, and together we turned in a small circle in the middle of the day room, with the nurses watching and the other residents gathering at the edges. A man in a wheelchair began to clap in time. A woman with a cane wiped her eyes. I swayed in the arms of my granddaughter and, for the length of one verse, I felt like a girl of nineteen again, dancing with Walter at the church hall.
When the song ended, Kaitlyn kissed my forehead. Then she did something I had not expected. She took out her phone, found the number of her father, and called him on speaker, right there in the day room. He answered on the fourth ring, sounding surprised. She said, “Dad, I am with Grandma. I need you to listen.” And she held the phone to the tape player and played him the second side, every word, with the voice of Steve himself saying it back to him.
The silence on the phone lasted a long time. When Steve spoke, his voice was ragged. “I was so busy,” he said. “I thought there would be time.” I took the phone from Kaitlyn. I said, “There still is, son. Not for your father. But for me.” He was crying openly. He said he would drive down that very night. I told him not to rush, that it was dark, and that I would be waiting in the same chair.
He arrived at nine, still in his work clothes, with a bunch of grocery store carnations in his hand. He stood in the door of my room, a fifty year old man, thinner than I remembered. I opened my arms and he came into them, and I felt the same shaking in his shoulders that I had felt when he was a baby with a fever. We said very little. We did not need to. Kaitlyn stood at the door with her hand over her mouth.
Steve visits every Saturday now. He brings the newspaper, and a crossword, and he sits by my window while I do the answers in pen. On the last Friday of each month, the whole fourth floor gathers in the day room for music. Kaitlyn comes with her guitar. We play the tape first, side one only. And when the song comes round to the part about the house on the hill, my son takes my hands, and we dance.