“Indianapolis,” I said aloud, finishing the line in the voice of a woman reading a sentence she does not want to read. “You need to hear what he said to the man in Indianapolis, Edna. The key opens the lockbox under the third porch step. I taped the calls for a week. I am sorry to leave you this. I love you. Bernard.” Mr. Haley stood on the porch with his hat against his chest. “Mrs. Pickett,” he said gently, “I will fetch a screwdriver. Or I will leave, if you would rather be alone.” I said, “Stay. Bring the screwdriver.”
The third step had a loose board. Mr. Haley, on his knees in the November wind, lifted it with a pry bar and reached in to the shoulder. He came out with a gray steel lockbox, rusty at the corners, and the little key turned in my hand on the first try. Inside lay a small cassette recorder, a dozen tapes in a rubber band, and a yellow legal pad covered with the clean printing of my husband. Dates, times, the number of rings. Bernard had been a lineman. He understood how to listen to a wire.
We played the first tape on the kitchen table, with the curtains shut. There was a hiss, a click, and then the unmistakable voice of my grandson Kyle, chuckling. “She is eighty four, Mr. Dunmore. She forgets her pills. I figure we get a doctor to say she cannot manage her own affairs, and I get power over the house. We list it in the spring.” A smooth older voice answered, “And my fee?” “Fifteen percent of the sale.” “Make it twenty,” said the man in Indianapolis, “and I will find you a doctor who agrees.” Mr. Haley closed his eyes.
A man who listens to the wire for thirty four years can still hear trouble coming across a kitchen.
Kyle came home at dusk with groceries. He stopped in the kitchen doorway with the bags hanging from both hands, and he saw the recorder, the lockbox, and the retired lineman sitting at my table. I will never forget the way the plastic bags slid slowly to the floor and a can of peaches rolled across the linoleum and stopped against his shoe. He did not say a word. He did not need to. I pressed the button, and my own kitchen filled with the sound of his voice.
He listened to the whole of it standing up. When it ended, he sat down on the chair nearest the door. He is twenty five years old, tall and pale, with the long hands of Bernard, and he held them clasped between his knees as though they might run off. “Grandma,” he said, “I was drowning. I owed money on the cards, and to a man who loaned me cash. Mr. Dunmore said it was just paperwork. He said you would be in a nice place with nurses.” He lifted his face. “I did not think about what you would say.”
“I will tell you what I say,” I said. “I say that the house is in a trust, Kyle. Your grandfather put it there with Mr. Feldman two weeks before he died. It cannot be sold by anyone except me, and when I am gone it goes to your cousins and the church. You were never going to get a dime of it.” His mouth opened. I could see him understand that he had committed a wrong for nothing. “That is the part,” I said, “that I will never get over. Not the wrong. The nothing.”
Mr. Feldman, the lawyer in Indianapolis, came in person the next Monday. He was seventy, with a cane and a laugh like a kettle. He listened to the tapes with his chin on his fist. Then he rang the state attorney general, and the board of medical examiners, and the sheriff of Marion County, in that order. Mr. Dunmore, who turned out to be a former attorney who had lost his license in 2015, was arrested at his office two days later with three other elderly clients in his files. Kyle gave a full statement. He was not charged, on account of Mr. Feldman, and on account of the tapes.
He moved out that same week. I did not tell him to go. He went to Fort Wayne, to the apartment of my sister, who gave him a room and a long list of chores. I heard she made him mow her lawn with a push mower. For six months, I did not hear his voice. Then, on a Sunday in April, the phone rang, and I answered, and a young man said, very softly, “Grandma?” It was Kyle. He had called from the green phone at the house of my sister, the one with the long curly cord, because she had kept hers, too.
Mr. Haley, meanwhile, had become a regular at my kitchen table. He brought pastries, and news of his collection, and one rainy Tuesday he brought a ladder. By evening, the green phone was back on its bracket by the stove, the cord curling down to the pot rack, repaired and cleaned and reconnected by the best lineman in the county. He tested the line with a handset from his pocket. “Dial tone, Mrs. Pickett,” he said, with the quiet pride of a man who has fixed one thing in the world. “Same as the day Bernard hung it.”
Kyle came home in June, thinner and browner, with a duffel bag and a job. He fixes phones now, at the shop of Mr. Haley on Walnut Street, and he is good at it. On Sundays, the green phone rings at four, and I answer, and my sister tells me about her tomatoes. Kyle sits at the table drinking lemonade. When I hang up, he says, “Grandma, I did not listen once.” We laugh until I have to wipe my eyes. Bernard, I think, would have laughed, too.