I saw it, and I had to sit down on the edge of the bed, because it was a little silver CD player, the kind they sold at the drugstore, with a disc already in it and a strip of masking tape across the front in Gene’s handwriting that said FOR CAROL — HEADPHONES ARE IN THE BOX.
They were. Folded in a sandwich bag with a fresh set of batteries taped to it, because that man never in his life left a job half-done.
I sat there a long while before I put them on.
It was my mother’s voice.
My mother died in 2004. In the last years she couldn’t drive and she called our house every evening at six, and we had one of those answering machines with the little tape in it, and when she passed I could not stand to erase the tape and so I took it out and put it in the junk drawer, and somewhere in about 2011 that drawer got cleaned out and I cried about it for a week.
Gene did not throw it away. He put it in a coffee can in the shop and never said a word, for fourteen years, because he knew if he told me he had it I’d have wanted to hear it and then I’d have been on the kitchen floor.
Last winter he took it to a fellow in Zanesville who transfers old tape. There’s a receipt in the bottom of that box, forty-five dollars, and a note from the man saying two of the messages were too far gone and he’d cleaned up the rest as best he could.
There are nine messages on that disc.
My mother telling me the pears are ready. My mother asking if Gene got the mower running. My mother saying she’s not calling about anything, she just wanted to hear somebody, and that she’ll let me go.
She always said that. I’ll let you go, honey. I had forgotten she said that until I heard it.
Under the player was the note, on shop paper.
Carol — I’ve had this since the drawer got cleaned out. I never told you because you weren’t ready and I wasn’t going to be the one to decide when you were. Put the headphones on when the house is empty. Don’t set it aside. You’ll want what’s in it one day, and one day comes quicker than a person thinks. — Gene
One day comes quicker than a person thinks. He wrote that in March and he was gone in the shop two weeks later, fifty-nine years old, and I had already set his box on the dresser and let him see I was hurt over a table saw and a plain pine lid.
I let that box sit for eleven months. My mother was in it the whole time.
I listen to the third one most. That’s the one where she’s laughing at something on the television and she has to start her sentence over twice.
The box is on the nightstand now with my initials burned crooked in the lid, and I have already told my daughter it’s hers and what’s in it, and I told her while I could still tell her myself.