She turned the screen toward me, and there wasn’t a game on it or old text messages.
It was the photo gallery.
Picture after picture of her and my husband. Fishing on the pond behind our house. Eating ice cream on the porch. Him teaching her how to shuffle cards. Silly selfies where he’d somehow managed to get both of them making the exact same ridiculous face. She kept scrolling quietly while I sat there watching.
Then she stopped on a video.
It was only about thirty seconds long. My husband was sitting in his recliner, talking directly to the camera. “Hey, Peanut,” he said, using the nickname only he ever called her. “If you’re watching this, it means you found my old phone again.” Ella smiled a little when his voice came on. I could tell she’d seen it a hundred times.
She told me she’d found the phone in a dresser drawer a few months earlier. Grandpa had let her make videos with it when she was younger, and she’d discovered they were all still there. Every time she missed him, she’d watch one. Not because she thought it was the same as having him back. Just because it let her hear his laugh again.
I asked why she never told me.
She looked down at the phone and said, “I thought it might make you sad.”
That about broke my heart right there. This sweet girl had been carrying around a piece of her grandfather for months, protecting my feelings while she was quietly missing him herself.
We spent the rest of that afternoon on the couch going through every photo and video on that old phone. Some made us laugh. A few made us cry. Most did both.
The phone sits in the top drawer of my living room table now, charged and ready. Last weekend Ella came over, curled up beside me on the couch, and pulled it out.
A few seconds later, my husband’s laugh filled the room again, and neither of us rushed to turn it off.