I set the pot down, walked him his coat and hat like a good hostess, and then I stopped at the hall table on the way to the door, and I pressed the button on Frank’s answering machine.
He wouldn’t let me get rid of that machine. Forty dollars at Kmart in 1994, and he kept it because he liked knowing a thing worked. Nineteen messages saved on it. I could have found the one I wanted with my eyes shut.
Frank called from the hospice phone on a Tuesday, three days before he died, while I’d gone home to shower and cry in my own bathroom where nobody could hear me. He was clearer that day than he’d been in a month.
My husband’s voice came up that hallway, and thirty-one people stopped where they stood.
He said hello, sweetheart, you missed me. He said the nurse had let him have the phone. He said the pie I’d brought was too dry and he loved me for bringing it anyway. And then he said the part I’d never played for another living soul:
Gene is going to come at you about the land before I’m cold, and he’ll say I settled for you. Let him. Both our names have been on that deed since ninety-nine and Pastor Dale has the copy. And Annie, I did not settle. I got lucky twice in one life. You were the second time, and you were the better one.
Then a nurse said something in the background, and Frank said he had to go, and the machine clicked, and my kitchen was so quiet I could hear the ham fat cooling in the pan.
Gene’s wife set her coffee cup down on the counter without a sound.
Gene sat down on the third stair with his coat over his arm and didn’t get up for a long while. His mouth was moving but nothing came out of it. Sixty-eight years old.
Here is the part my sister will never forgive me for. I didn’t put him out. I didn’t say one word about what he’d called me by that sink. I went and got him a plate, because he hadn’t eaten and there was enough food in that house to feed a church, and I set it down beside him on the stairs.
He asked me to play it again. Just him. So I did, twice, and the second time he cried like a boy, and I stood there holding a dish towel and let him.
He came back in April and rebuilt my porch step, the loose one Frank never got to. Wouldn’t take a dime. In May he brought over three photo albums from their mother’s house, pictures of Frank at nine, at nineteen, in his work truck, and he sat at my table and told me stories about my own husband that I had never heard.
They came for Thanksgiving. Both of them. His wife brought a pie and it was too dry and I did not say a word about it.
People will tell you what you were to somebody. They are almost never the ones who were told.