The cold linoleum under my boots had that faint, sour smell of damp pine needles we tracked in every autumn from the woodpile by the back porch. I was standing by the porcelain sink, rinsing out a coffee mug that still had a stubborn ring of grounds clinging to the bottom, when the screen door banged shut against the outside wall. Arthur came in kicking his work boots off against the door jamb with a dull, heavy thud that rattled the coat rack. His face was the color of a wet slate shingle, all pinched around the corners of his mouth where he held his tobacco. He did not say good morning or even grunt the way he usually did when the rheumatism was acting up in his left knee. He just marched straight past the table, hauled his canvas jacket off his shoulders, and dropped it into the wicker basket by the pantry like it was dead weight.<\/p>\n
I kept my back to him, watching the dirty gray water swirl down the brass drain hole. I knew that look on his face. It was the same look he had the day the intake valve on the Massey-Ferguson cracked right in the middle of haying season. He had spent three hours cussing at a rusty bolt before he finally took a sledgehammer to the whole housing and ruined a three-hundred-dollar casting out of pure stubbornness. Arthur was the kind of man who believed that if something fought him twice, it deserved to be broken.<\/p>\n
“It is gone,” he said. His voice sounded like gravel being kicked down a dry culvert.<\/p>\n
I turned the tap off and wiped my hands on the floral dish towel hanging from the oven handle. “What is gone now, Arthur?”<\/p>\n
“The phone,” he snapped, jerking his chin toward the back door like the yard itself had personally offended him. “The whole damn thing. Right off the boat. Slipped right out of my shirt pocket the second the outboard motor caught a patch of milfoil and the hull jerked sideways. Went down fifty feet into black water near the spillway.”<\/p>\n
I leaned back against the counter, crossing my arms over my chest. “Well. Did you look for it?”<\/p>\n
“Look for it?” He let out a harsh, barking laugh that had no humor in it at all. “Lucy, it is sitting in fifty feet of silt right beside an old outboard tire and three rusted beer cans from nineteen-eighty-four. You cannot dive for a phone in the middle of Merwin Reservoir without a dredge and a prayer. I am done with the modern junk anyway. I am going back to the landline.”<\/p>\n
He stomped down the hallway toward the bathroom, and the floorboards groaned under his weight the way they always did when he was in a temper. I stayed by the sink, looking out the little window above the basin at the overgrown blackberry canes tangling along the fence line. I did not tell him he was an idiot, though he was. I did not remind him that he had spent eight hundred dollars on that stupid piece of glass just six months prior because his old flip phone did not have enough memory for his grandson’s baseball videos. There was no point in talking sense to Arthur when the red mist was down over his eyes. When Arthur got mad, the whole house had to tiptoe around him until the weather cleared.<\/p>\n
The months that followed were quieter than they had any right to be. Arthur bought a heavy black plastic landline phone with big rubber buttons that clicked like small pistol shots every time he punched in an order for feed at the co-op. He grumbled about the bills, of course. He grumbled about the telemarketers trying to sell him roof repairs on a tin-roofed house that had weathered forty winters without leaking a drop. But mostly he just went about his business, hauling feed sacks out of the bed of his Dodge and swearing at the weather reports on the kitchen radio. We did not talk about the phone at the bottom of the reservoir. It became one of those invisible things in our house, like the oil stain on the driveway or the loose shingle over the back porch that we both pretended we would fix someday.<\/p>\n
I kept myself busy with the garden and the local church committee, putting up jars of pickled beets and volunteering down at the clinic on Tuesdays. Life out here in southern Illinois does not leave much room for dwelling on what gets lost. Things break, things rust, and things sink. You pull your boots on, you drink your coffee black, and you keep moving because the dirt does not care whether you are sad or not.<\/p>\n
Thirteen months came and went without a whisper. The maple tree by the driveway dropped its leaves twice, turning the grass into a soggy brown carpet that took three weekends to rake up. Arthur\u2019s knees got worse with the winter damp, and he spent most evenings sitting in the brown vinyl recliner with a heating pad pressed against his thigh, watching old westerns with the sound turned down low so he could hear the wind rattling the siding.<\/p>\n
It was a Tuesday afternoon in late November when the kitchen phone rang. It was 3:24 PM, according to the little digital clock on the microwave that never quite kept the right time. Arthur was out in the shed trying to patch a leaky garden hose with black electrical tape and a hose clamp. I was standing at the kitchen table sorting through a stack of seed catalogs that had come in the mail, my fingers gray from newsprint.<\/p>\n
The phone made that sharp, shrill ring that always made my shoulders jump. I picked up the receiver and gave our number the way we always did out here in the county.<\/p>\n
“Hello?”<\/p>\n
“Arthur?” a man’s voice asked on the other end. It was a calm voice, steady and low, with a slight drawl that sounded like it came from down around Paducah way. It did not sound like a telemarketer or someone selling insurance.<\/p>\n
“No,” I said, shifting the phone to my other ear. “This is his sister, Lucy. Arthur is out in the shed. Who is this?”<\/p>\n
There was a pause on the line, just long enough for me to hear the faint hiss of static and someone coughing softly in the background. Then the man spoke again.<\/p>\n
“Tell Arthur I found his phone.”<\/p>\n
I froze with a seed catalog half-open in my hand. The kitchen suddenly felt very quiet, save for the rhythmic clicking of the refrigerator compressor starting up in the corner. “His what?”<\/p>\n
“His phone,” the man repeated, and I could hear a faint smile in his tone. “The one he dropped in Merwin Reservoir back in October of last year. I was out on the water with my boy checking our trotlines near the old spillway. The anchor snagged on something heavy. Pulled it up, and tangled right in the rope was an old waterproof pouch with a phone inside. I figured it was trash. Plugged it in just to see if the battery was completely fried. Miraculously, the thing booted right up.”<\/p>\n
My throat felt dry, like I had been swallowing dust. “It works? After a whole year at the bottom of the lake?”<\/p>\n
“Turns out those rubber seals actually do what they promise,” the stranger said. “Took a bit of cleaning around the charging port, but it took a charge right off my truck adapter. The screen unlocked after two tries because I recognized his birthday on the lock screen photo. And I saw your family photos, Lucy. You have a beautiful family.”<\/p>\n
I had to grab the edge of the kitchen table with my free hand because my knees suddenly felt like wet paper. I did not know what to say. I just stood there staring at the grease spot on the oilcloth. “Who… who are you?”<\/p>\n
“My name is Dale,” the man said softly. “Dale Miller. I live down near Metropolis. I figured the owner had to be local, so I looked through the contacts and called the number labeled ‘Sister.’ That is you, I guess.”<\/p>\n
“Dale,” I breathed out, my chest tightening up. “Arthur… Arthur has been kicking himself over that phone for over a year. Not because of the money, though Lord knows he hated losing it. But because of the pictures.”<\/p>\n
“I figured as much,” Dale said, and his voice dropped an octave, turning gentle and heavy. “There are a lot of pictures of a woman on here. Smiling by the garden, sitting on the front porch with a yellow cat, holding a basket of green beans. She has kind eyes.”<\/p>\n
The air went completely out of my lungs. I closed my eyes tight, pressing my forehead against the cool edge of the upper cabinet. I did not want to say her name out loud, because saying it made the empty chair at the end of the hall feel too real, too heavy to carry.<\/p>\n
“That was Clara,” I whispered into the receiver. “Arthur\u2019s wife. She passed away three years ago this coming spring. Those photos… that was pretty much all he had left of her voice and her laugh. He never backed them up to the cloud because he didn’t trust computers.”<\/p>\n
Dale was quiet for a long moment. I could hear the faint sound of a dog barking somewhere in the background on his end of the line, and the rattle of a screen door closing. When he spoke again, his voice had grown thick, almost like he was fighting off his own thoughts.<\/p>\n
“I am sorry, Lucy. I really am.”<\/p>\n
“He was furious when he dropped it,” I said, and I could hear the shake in my own voice now, betraying the calm front I tried to keep for my brother. “He swore he didn’t care, but he would sit out on the back porch at dusk sometimes, staring out toward the water like he expected it to spit the thing back up. He blamed himself for being clumsy.”<\/p>\n
“Well, you tell him he can stop blaming himself,” Dale said. “I am sending the phone back to you by priority mail today. I cleaned out the salt corrosion as best as I could. It charges slow, but it holds a charge for a good six hours now if you turn the brightness down.”<\/p>\n
I wiped a stray tear off my cheek with the back of my hand, angry at myself for crying over a piece of metal and glass. “Dale, how much do we owe you for the shipping? I can put a check in the mail tonight, ”<\/p>\n
“You don’t owe me a dime, Lucy,” Dale interrupted, and there was a quiet finality in his tone that didn’t allow for an argument. “Just tell Arthur to keep his hands away from the gunwale next time he takes the boat out.”<\/p>\n
“Thank you,” I choked out. “Thank you for calling. You have no idea what this is going to do to him.”<\/p>\n
“There is one more thing,” Dale added, and I could hear a slight hesitation in his voice, like he was weighing whether or not he should say it.<\/p>\n
“What is that?” I asked, my grip tightening on the receiver until my knuckles turned white.<\/p>\n
“I copied all of Clara’s photos onto a flash drive just in case the battery gives out again on the trip,” Dale said. “And I added a photo of my own family to the drive, too. My wife, Sarah, and our two girls out by the old dock at sunset. I figured… well, I figured if a man loses everything once, he ought to know there are still good people out there watching his back. So you’re not alone.”<\/p>\n
I stood there in the empty kitchen with the phone pressed to my ear, listening to the dial tone start its steady, low hum after the line went dead. I did not put the receiver down right away. I looked out the window toward the shed where Arthur was still hammering away at that stupid hose, his shoulders bent against the cold wind, fighting the dirt the way he always did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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