What’d You Tell Her?
by Tom Roth
“When can I get a phone?” she asks me.
We’re on our way to my parents’ place in the country. The apartment buildings and big box centers give way to fields and farmlands. Gray strips of snow thin out in the hard sun. Birds lift off the powerlines. I sometimes forget what this place looks like. It’s been too long since I’ve taken Taylor to see Mom and Dad, but it’s hard when Grandpa can’t talk or walk or remember anyone.
“You don’t need a cell phone,” I say. “You’re twelve.”
A fallen black barn rots in the snow. My father emerges in the center of the debris, sitting in his plaid recliner. The oxygen tube shines like an icicle on his nose. His mouth opens for nothing, and his head droops from an invisible weight, and the road seems to pull us past him before he can catch a glimpse of our car. Out here, the few trees, his only company, stand apart from one another. I don’t remember it all looking so desolate and bare and neglected. A stillness settles in me. When had that barn collapsed?
“When I was your age,” I say, “I talked on a landline.”
“A what?”
“A landline. You know, a phone connected to your house. Remember the one we had when you were little?”
“Oh yeah,” Taylor says. I can tell she doesn’t remember. “But I don’t see your point.”
Just like her dad, her Grandpa, too, always countering anything I say. My elementary school appears at the town intersection of low brick buildings. Chains wrap around the rusted fence. A few windows are boarded-up because people break in for shelter. I see Dad again, only now he’s younger, with a moustache, and he’s standing, his fingers curled through the fence, a ballcap on his head.
“My point,” I start.
We’re coming up on their place, a narrow house with a front gable. It sits on a wide stretch of brown grass and melting snow. My husband first wanted to stay out here, but I had said “What would we do?” and that was enough—we bought a house in a cul-de-sac. When Taylor was a baby, my father called our house almost every day. I’d press the wireless silver phone between my ear and shoulder, holding Taylor in my arms, and I’d listen to my father on the other line talk about the wild turkeys and geese and deer he watched that morning. I’d zone out through most of it until he’d ask to put Taylor on the line.
“I gotta tell her somethin,” he’d whisper.
I could see him on the other side of the line, looking out the window, the snow reflected in his glasses. I’d put the phone near Taylor’s little face. I couldn’t make out what he said, but I felt I was in bed and he was tucking me in.
“What’d you tell her?” I had asked him once.
“That’s between me and her,” he had laughed. “When you coming over? You should’ve seen the turkeys here earlier, Beth. There must’ve been twenty of em struttin around.”
“Soon,” I had said. “We’ll get there.”
He worsened when we got rid of our landline. They were going out of style then. They’re obsolete anyway, since everyone’s always got their cell phone on them. His daily calls about the fields had stopped, and I lost sight of this place the less and less I came back to it over the years. I can’t remember the last time we spoke over the phone, the last time he said something to me, to Taylor.
“Mom?” Taylor says.
I’d been looking at the fields, in search of a turkey, a deer, something I could tell to Dad.
“My point,” I say, “is that you never need to call someone all the time. You don’t always need a phone on you.”
I look out at the fields again but see no turkeys.
“Yes you do,” she says.
Tom Roth teaches creative writing at a middle school in Cincinnati, Ohio. His most recent publications are in Great Lakes Review, Talking River Review, and Outlook Springs. He earned an MFA from Chatham University. He recently finished a draft of a novel titled Silva, Ohio.