She’d been waiting for me to pick up the phone, and she just didn’t want to say that part out loud, and I know that now because she wrote it down instead, on the fourth page, in handwriting that had gotten shakier than I remembered.
There were four things in that envelope.
The first was a letter, eleven pages, front and back. It is not the letter I would have predicted. There is no defense of herself in it. There is a paragraph about the Thanksgiving in 2015 where she says plainly that she was wrong and that she knew it in the car on the way home and said nothing for six years because she had decided that being the one who called first would mean she’d been the only one at fault, and that this was pride, and that pride is a stupid thing to take to the grave.
The second was a photograph I had never seen. Me at maybe seven, asleep on the floor in front of a box fan, and my father’s hand in the frame at the edge, and on the back in ballpoint: Kept this in my wallet for thirty years and I want you to have it while you can still ask me about it, so call me, Michael, I am not going to be here forever and I am too proud to say it any plainer than this.
While you can still ask me about it. She wrote that in October and mailed nothing and died in December.
The third was a folder of paperwork — her accounts, her insurance, the name of her attorney, a page listing where everything was, all of it organized the way she organized everything, and my name on the line as executor. My brother’s name was on nothing, and there was a note explaining that this was not favoritism, that it was the only official reason she could construct that would force the two of us to speak within a week of her being gone.
She engineered it. She sat in that apartment and thought: if he won’t answer the phone, I will make the county make him call.
The fourth thing was a burner-simple prepaid cell phone, still in the package, with a sticky note on it that said her number was already programmed in as the only contact.
I don’t know what to do with that one. I still don’t. It’s in my desk drawer.
I had her October voicemail on my phone the entire time. Twenty-two seconds. I had never listened to it. I listened to it that night in the parking lot of her building with the heat running, and it is nothing — it is her saying it’s her, and asking if I got the thing she sent, which she had not sent, and then a long pause, and then her saying all right, well.
All right, well. That’s the last thing my mother ever said to me and I let it sit unopened on a phone in my pocket for six weeks.
My brother came up on a Saturday and we went through the apartment together and it took two days and we said things to each other we had not said in a decade, which is exactly what she planned, and I told him so, and he laughed until he had to sit down on the floor.
I call my son every Sunday now whether he answers or not. He’s nineteen and he thinks it’s a little much.
Pick up the phone. That’s all I’ve got. Pick up the phone, or say the thing plainly while there’s somebody there to hear it, because seventy-two hours is not very long at all.