One Missed Call

There you go—you've wasted your whole weekend again. Sunday evening and, as usual, you're working on things that need to be done by tomorrow, things that you could have done last week or even yesterday after work but you didn't, and you didn't do anything else either. That to-do list you wrote out Friday night is on the desk without a single box checked.

Outside, it's been snowing for over three hours. It's no excuse not to have done any of the cleaning, you remind yourself, as cleaning doesn't require going outside, but the melancholic feeling that comes with dreary weather is hard to combat. The joys of living in Minnesota.

There is a pile of dirty laundry sitting at the foot of the bed. It should be in a basket on its way to the laundry room downstairs, but like most other chores, it's been neglected. In a couple hours, you tell yourself. Ignoring it for the time being, you go to the kitchen for a snack, where your roommate tells you all about her day at work at the nursing home—about the old man that shat himself three feet from the toilet and the lady who carries a card around to remind her who she is and where she is and why. She even tells you about the man that passed away last week—Scotty Baldwin, the one who sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” as the nurses were putting him to bed at night and swore the character on General Hospital was named after him. You would have liked him, you think.

Halfway through your Cheerios—the last in the box, because on top of everything else you neglected to go grocery shopping this weekend—your mother calls. Her voice is softer and lower than usual, and as soon as she asks, “Do you have a minute?” you know it's bad news.

Your father's uncle passed away this morning, she tells you. Uncle Bill. You remember him a little bit. He was the one that lived in a small house all the way down in Arkansas and had a pretty brown horse called Sugar. Sugar was an old, decrepit thing, but the year you turned five and your parents made the road trip down south for a week that summer to visit, you sat on her bony back without a saddle while Uncle Bill led you at a slow pace around the pasture. You begged to go faster, to gallop away at full speed and jump over the fence and be a cowgirl like in the old western movies your father always watched.

Sugar died a long time ago. Even when you were five years old she was ancient, though you didn't realize it then. Now for some reason you're afraid of horses, and any other animal bigger than you, too, but you still remember Sugar better than you remember Uncle Bill.

Your family hasn't had the money to make the road trip to Arkansas in a long time, so you haven't seen him since you were twelve. Or had he been at your grandfather's funeral a couple years ago? You don't suppose you'd know—you don't remember what he looked like, except that he had half a thumb from an accident that happened one time while he was cleaning one of his guns. You only remember that he had lived alone on your great grandfather's property, that he hunted, and that he led you around on that pretty horse when you were a child.

Maybe you should call your father. You pick up your cell phone and find him in your contacts list, and stare at the word “dad” for a long time without pushing “dial.”

Your mom said Uncle Bill died just because he was old. You forget sometimes, the way your father talked about him, that he was your grandfather's brother and not your father's. He must have been about seventy, maybe a few years older. Did he ever end up in a place like your roommate works? Did he need a card to tell him his name, or someone to help him to the bathroom a few times a day? Or did he stay alone on that big property with the woods in the back?

The hardest part of all this, for your father at least, will probably be not going to the funeral. The way gas prices are now, the fourteen hour drive to Arkansas just isn't feasible, and it's too hard to make such a long trip on such short notice. Then again, maybe he, like you, would be relieved at not having to face the funeral.

No, you know him better than that. As much as he hated not seeing his family down south very often, he'd be kicking himself for not even being able to pay his last respects to his uncle.

You have a picture of your dad in your phone next to his name. In the picture, he's putting his hand up to his face to make his nose look like a pig's snout and he's crossing his eyes. You remember the day you took that picture—a couple months ago, when you'd come home extremely shaken up from a narrowly avoided accident along the way. After you had stuttered out your story about the idiot that nearly hit you driving twenty miles an hour above the speed limit on the state highway, your father had offered you a beer from the fridge and started making faces and telling jokes. Terrible jokes—puns and toilet humor—but it made you laugh. It was his way of cheering you up.

He always did things like that. Your mother would roll her eyes and tell him to grow up, and he would insist that he's enjoying his second childhood, and your mother would swear that he never left his first one, but that's what you'd always liked about him. The nut doesn't fall far from the tree, your mother would say.

Despite your father's childish antics, he is visibly aging. His beard is like white Velcro, lacking all the dignity of his soft silver hair (with a hairline that's receded halfway up his scalp). Heavy lines appear now around his smiling eyes. You know that his knees bother him, and his back bothers him, and he has trouble breathing sometimes because he smoked two packs a day until five years ago.

He keeps a couple bottles of pills for his blood pressure and cholesterol on top of the fridge because his mom was only fifty-three when she died of a heart attack. He's fifty-two now.

You stare down at your phone, thinking hard about her, about your grandpa, about Uncle Bill, even about Sugar and Scotty Baldwin. And, at long last, you press “dial.”

Ring. You think about what you're going to say. What are the right words of comfort to someone who has lost a loved one you never even really knew?

Ring. You think about grief, and the way there are never the right words to describe the heaviness, the way getting through the day is like treading water with weights on your ankles. How do you respond to it?

Ring. You think about what it must have been like for your father. To lose his mother, his father, his uncle.

Ring. You think about cigarettes and heart attacks and cholesterol pills.

“You have reached...” The answering machine rattles off your father's phone number. You hang up before it beeps.

For a moment, you regret it. He's going to see a missed call and wonder what you wanted. He's going to call back, and you're going to have to talk to him, and there won't be any excuse not to.

Then again, maybe not. Your father is not a man to communicate emotions, let alone grief, that isolating world where language is absent. You know him well enough to know that, today of all days, he won't be calling back. Tomorrow he'll call, and you'll talk about how the Minnesota Wild have lost their last three games and there's going to be a blizzard this weekend and maybe you'll go ice fishing in a couple weeks. Anything but Uncle Bill, and death, and the guilt of staying alive.