Back in that hollow was a shoebox wrapped in a plastic grocery bag from Kroger. Inside were cassette tapes, maybe twenty of them, each one in its own clear case. Every label was written in the same neat cursive. For Jamie. Tape One. For Jamie. Tape Two. All the way up.
Tucked under the lid was a note on pink stationery, dated March 1985. I did not read it. I carried the whole box upstairs to the fella who hired me. His name was Carl, a retired mailman who had just bought the place to be closer to his grandkids.
Carl read the note out loud at his kitchen table. It was from a mother named Linda. She said she was sick and did not have long. She had recorded herself reading bedtime stories for her little boy, one for every night she would miss, and some talking about her life so he would know who she was. She hid them in the wall because her husband was grieving so hard he boxed up everything of hers and could not stand to see it. She was going to tell her sister where they were so Jamie could have them when he was grown.
Carl looked at me. We both knew it probably never happened.
He had an old tape deck in the garage. We put in Tape One. There was a little hiss, and then a young woman laughed and said, hey buddy, it is Mom. I had to walk out on the porch for a minute.
Carl knew everybody in Moundsville from thirty years on a mail route. It took him one afternoon at the post office to find out the family. Linda passed in the summer of 1985. The sister moved to Florida a year later and died young herself. The husband sold the house in the nineties. And Jamie was now forty four, a welder living over in Wheeling, twelve miles up the road.
He was two years old when his mother died, and he had never once heard her voice.
Carl called him. Jamie did not believe it at first. He drove down that same night still in his work clothes.
Carl set the box on the table, put a tape in the deck, and pressed play. Jamie heard his mother say hey buddy, and he put both hands flat on that table and just broke. Twenty tapes. Hours of her. Stories, songs, her telling him about the county fair and how she met his dad at a Dairy Queen.
His father was still alive, eighty years old in a care home. Jamie brought him the tapes the next week. The old man had always said he could not remember what she sounded like anymore. He listened to all of Tape One with his eyes closed.
Jamie had every tape put on a flash drive, and he sent me a copy of one. It is her reading Goodnight Moon.
Twenty three years I have been hanging drywall. I have covered a lot of walls. That is the only one I was ever glad somebody opened.