I turned the cassette over and pressed play again. The hiss came up, and then Daddy cleared his throat the way he always did before he said something he had practiced.
He said, Button, it is under the machine. The battery door. I figured you would be the one to eject this, and I figured the machine would end up in your old room, because Fern has no use for anything that blinks.
Fern made a small sound. Mr. Boyd looked at me over his glasses.
Daddys voice went on, easy and slow. He said he had a few more words for Fern. He said, Fern, honey, I know you think I did this to hurt you. I did not. You were good to me for nine years, and you will have thirty-one thousand dollars and my truck and the roof over your head for as long as you need to find a new one. But the house was Collettes mothers house before it was ours, and I promised her.
Then he said, Button, eat something green. Daddy. And the tape clicked off.
Nobody in that lawyers office said a thing. I was crying, and I did not wipe my face. I had not heard his voice in seven months.
The machine was in my trunk. I had brought it in a grocery bag, because I had a feeling. Mr. Boyd set it on his desk and turned it over, and I unscrewed the little plastic battery door with a nail file from my purse. Folded flat against the contacts, in a sandwich bag, were three pages of yellow legal paper in his block capitals.
My hand-written will, it began. I, Amos Dwayne Pruitt, being of sound mind. It was signed and dated the week after Christmas. It was witnessed by two men from his Tuesday coffee group, who had signed their names and written their phone numbers underneath, like a pair of old railroad men.
Daddy kept thirty years of Fridays on a tape because he knew that a voice can say what a lawyer cannot.
Kentucky recognizes a will written entirely in the makers own hand, signed and proven by his handwriting, and Mr. Boyd had known my fathers hand for twenty years. He filed it with the court that afternoon. The earlier will was set aside. The judge confirmed it within the month, after both coffee-group witnesses came to the courthouse in their church clothes and swore they had seen him sign.
Fern did not contest it. She sat in that lawyers office with her hand flat on the table, and then she took off Daddys watch and laid it in front of me. She said, I was afraid I would have nothing of his. She said she had never meant to throw the tapes out for good. She had put them at the curb in a moment of grief that turned to anger, and she had been ashamed of it every day since.
The lawn bags were not in the dump. Mr. Tolliver, next door, had seen them at the curb, and he had known what they were, and he had carried all six into his garage that same night. He said he did not want to make a scene. He said he figured someone would come looking.
I picked them up on a Saturday. Thirty years of Fridays, labeled by month in my fathers block letters.
Fern has the truck and the savings, as Daddy wished, and she is staying in the house until June. I told her she can stay longer if she needs. On the first Friday of every month, she comes to my shop for a wash and set, and we sit under the dryers and listen to a tape. She picks the month. She says it is the only way she gets to hear him say her name.