Thursday came. I put on my church dress on a weekday, drove down Second Street, and walked up those steps into an empty sanctuary, where Deacon Ray was waiting for me with a small player, a stack of discs, and a calendar.
He had me sit. He said Harold came to see him all through that last spring, not to talk about his failing heart, but to make something. Something that would let him keep speaking to me long after he was gone.
Harold was never a man of many words on paper. He could not have written me a stack of letters if he tried. But he could talk, in that low easy voice I fell in love with at nineteen. So that is what he did.
He recorded his voice for you, Deacon Ray said. A little for every day you were going to need him.
Then he showed me the calendar. Harold had gone through the whole year, and beside every date that would be hard, he had marked a recording. Our anniversary. My birthday. His birthday. Christmas morning. The first day of spring, when we always planted the tomatoes together. And one more, marked only, for the day you feel most alone, to be played whenever that day came.
Deacon Ray had promised to keep them for a year, because Harold knew that if I heard his voice in those first raw months, it would break me instead of hold me. He wanted me strong enough to smile.
Ray put in the first disc, the one marked simply, start here, and pressed play, and then he stepped out and closed the door and left me alone with my husband.
And there was Harold. That voice. He said, hello, my Ada. If you are hearing this, then a year has gone by, and Deacon Ray kept his promise, and you are strong enough now. He told me not to cry, and then he laughed and said he knew I would anyway. He talked to me like it was any ordinary morning at our kitchen table, the eggs frying, the radio low.
He had made one for every hard day of the year, and enough years of them that I will not run out for a long, long time. On our anniversary I will hear him tell the story of our wedding at the church on Cherry Street. On my birthday I will hear him sing to me, badly, the way he always did. And on the loneliest night, whenever it comes, I will press a button and my husband will tell me I am not alone, that he is right here, that he never really left.
I fried that man eggs every morning for forty-three years. I thought when he died the mornings would go silent forever. Instead he found a way to keep talking to me, past his own heart giving out, past the grave, one recording at a time.
Harold could not stay. So he left me his voice, marked out across the calendar of my grief, so that I would never again have to face a hard day without hearing him say my name.