Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Iclose the show for a few days. Reruns fill the slot, and the call-in line stays dark, so there’s nobody to turn away. People in town know by now, and they keep it to themselves. Nobody stops to tell us they’re sorry for our loss, and we’re all okay with that.
There’s no funeral. I don’t give him one.
It’s got nothing to do with what he wanted and everything to do with me being done arranging my life around that man.
There’s no one to come anyway. His body went from the morgue to the funeral home, and into the ground.
I wasn’t there. Neither was my mother. I went to the reading of his will.
He left me everything with a note to do with his things as I wished.
What a sad life to have lived. To have possessions but you can’t give them to anyone because of how you treated people. A life, gone. No one around who wants to mourn you, to write a fulfilling obituary about the life you led. I didn’t write one. I had nothing to say.
Josie’s answer was to fill the house with happiness.
With babbling babies, my children and friends.
The noise helped. I held grandbabies. I promised to love them until the day I couldn’t.
I told Noah and Paige I was proud of them.
They needed to hear the words even though they knew it.
They’ve always known and have never had to question my love for them.
Josie squeezed my shoulder every time she passed.
I hired someone to go through his apartment. To organize and catalog his belongings. All his clothes were to be donated, along with his dishes, furniture, and other household items. The remaining stuff will be put in storage until my mom and I are ready.
If we ever are.
I go back to work because it’s something for my mind to do. I hate sitting there, wondering about life. Josie drives me down the first night. She doesn’t say why. I know it’s because she’s waiting for me to break down and wants to be there to catch me.
Bex meets me at the door with coffee and a look that dares me to tell her I’m not ready. I don’t. Ember’s already at the board, headphones on, running the screen. Neither of them makes it a thing.
The chair’s the same. I put the headphones on. The board through the glass is the same. I sit down in my own booth and for a second it’s the strangest room I’ve ever been in. Then Bex says ninety seconds in my ear, and it’s just work again.
The light goes red. “You’re on The Love Line with Liam,” I say. My voice comes out even, lacking the emotion I need to do this job.
My voice comes back the second I start talking. Whoever’s out there tonight, however many more than a month ago, the work is the same. One person in a dark car, and me, and whatever’s true between us.
The first two are easy. A man fighting with his brother over their mother’s house. A woman whose kid won’t call home from school. I answer both and move on.
Then Ember’s in my ear. “Line four. She sounds shaky. I almost didn’t put her through.” I take it. “You’re on The Love Line with Liam,”
“Hi.” A woman. She stops, starts again. “My father’s dying. We haven’t spoken in years. Everybody keeps telling me I’ll regret it if I don’t go to him. But he wasn’t a good father. And I don’t know why I’m supposed to hand him my forgiveness just because he’s the one who ran out of time.”
I don’t have the quick one for her. For the length of a breath I’ve got nothing at all, and the dead air sits there, and Bex leans toward the glass but doesn’t cut in.
“Can I tell you something I haven’t said to anyone outside of my family,” I say. “My father died this week.”
The booth goes still.
“We hadn’t spoken in years,” I tell her.
“He wasn’t a good father either. He was hard, and he was cold, and he spent my whole childhood making me feel like something he had to correct.
Then he got sick. Somebody called me because I was the only name he had left to give anybody. And I almost didn’t go.”
“What made you,” she says. Quiet now.
“My wife told me I’d regret it if I didn’t.
So I went. And he said the thing I’d waited my whole life to hear, and he said it too late to fix one single thing between us.
That’s the part I need you to hear, because nobody will tell you this straight.
Going doesn’t fix it. You go, and it’s still broken, and the man’s still exactly who he was. ”
“Did he say he was sorry,” she asks.
“No. He said he was proud of me. Which isn’t the same thing. I’ve decided to let it be enough, because it’s all there’s ever going to be.”
“Then why go,” she says.
“Because the door only closes once. You don’t go for him.
You go so you’re the one who decides how it ended, instead of letting him decide it for you by dying first. I didn’t forgive my father.
I might never. But I sat in the chair. I put my hand on his shoulder.
And when the call came that he was gone, I wasn’t lying there holding a single word I wished I’d said.
That’s the whole of what I’ve got for you. Go.”
For a second there’s just the hiss of the open line. Then she says it small, more to herself than to me. “Okay. I’ll go.” She’s crying. She thanks me, and she’s gone before I can say anything back.
The board lights up and stays lit, every line, and then the overflow Ember has no slots for.
I take a few more. One of them is a man who doesn’t have a question.
He just wants to tell me he hasn’t spoken to his own father in years, and that he’s driving out there tomorrow.
His voice breaks on the word tomorrow. He hangs up before I can tell him good.
I hope he goes. I hope there’s somebody at the end of that drive better at it than mine was.
For a minute after the light goes dark I sit there. I’ve said things on this show for months and meant most of them. I never once said that. Not to a caller, not to Josie, not to my own reflection. It took a dying man and a stranger on line four to get it out of me.
When I pull the headphones off, my phone’s going off. Paige. All caps: DAD. THIS IS EVERYWHERE. YOU’RE EVERYWHERE. I’M SO PROUD OF YOU. Under it, a second one: don’t read the numbers tonight, just come home. She knows me. I put the phone in my pocket without looking at the numbers.
Bex comes out of the booth with her eyes wet. She doesn’t wipe them and she doesn’t apologize for them. “That’s the best hour of radio I’ve ever produced,” she says.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever said,” I tell her. She nods and lets me have it without a speech. “I need to go, though. I want to be with my family. Can you run reruns the rest of the night?”
She nods. “I know there isn’t anything I can say to ease what you’re feeling, just know I’m a good listener if you want to talk.”
“Thanks, Bex,” I say as I head to the door.
Ember catches me as I pass by with a stack of mail. “This one didn’t come through the post,” she says. “It was in the door when I locked up last night.”
It’s a plain card, no envelope, no name. Small handwriting I’ve started to know without wanting to.
I felt it too, listening. I’ve always felt what you feel. That’s how I know we’re the same, you and me. You’re not alone in it. I’m right here.
Where the signature should be there’s a heart instead, drawn slow, filled in solid.
Bex reads it over my shoulder before I can turn it face down. She doesn’t say the name. She doesn’t have to. “That’s her,” she says. “Same handwriting.” She holds her palm out for it, and I hand it over.
“It’s a card,” I say. “It’s a lonely woman and a card.”
Bex gives me a flat look and doesn’t bother answering it. “Go home,” she says. “I’ve got this.”
My mother texts while I’m still in the lot.
Mother
It was his loss, son. Not yours.
I don’t text back. I’ll see her when I get home and if she’s not there, I’ll walk out back to visit her. Maybe I need her, to spend some time with her, to get over what I’m feeling. If he hadn’t called or the nurse hadn’t called, I wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t feel.
I pull into my driveway, get out and brace myself for the headlights that come in behind me. I shield my eyes until I get out of the spotlight. Nick gets out of his car with a plate in his hand.
“Talisa made too much dinner. I think she did it on purpose.” He walks toward me.
It smells damn good. I take the plate from him. “I would’ve come over for dinner if you wanted to see me.”
“Shut up.” Nick shakes his head. “You okay?” he asks, which is way of saying he’s sorry about Sterling.
“No,” I tell him. “But I will be.” He nods and lets it all stay there between us.
“I asked Teagan to dinner,” he says then, to the porch rail, not to me. “This weekend.”
It takes everything I have not to come out of my skin. “Yeah?”
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t do the face.”
“I’m not doing a face.”
“You’ve been doing the face for weeks. You did it at the school thing. I watched you do it across the gym like you thought you were slick.” He points the finger at me. “She said yes to me. Not to whatever you think you set up. I asked her. Me.”
“Sure,” I say. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, my man.”
“I mean it, Westbury.” But he’s losing a fight with a smile the whole time he says it, and he knows I can see it, and he’s in his car before it wins.
Inside, the house is full of my people. Harrison’s asleep in my good chair, his bad arm hanging off the side, a baby drowsing on his chest. Josie and Katelyn are at the counter with wine and their heads together. Somebody’s got music going low. Paige is cross-legged on the floor with her laptop.
She holds it up when she sees me. “I’m not showing you numbers,” she says.
“I’m showing you this.” It’s a message from a woman who played my hour for her mother in a hospice room.
They both cried, she says. First real thing they’d done together in a year.
“That’s why,” Paige says. “Not the numbers. That.” My kid, already running this whole thing better than I ever could.
Harrison stirs when Paige gets loud. He cracks an eye, takes in my face, and goes back under, his free hand coming up to keep the baby steady on his chest. Katelyn lifts her glass at me across the counter. There’s a plate for me in the microwave with my name on a sticky note in Paige’s writing.
Josie crosses to me and puts her hands flat on my chest and looks up. “There he is,” she says as I put the plate Talisa sent over down.
She spent her whole life holding me up. My turn.
I hold her there in the middle of the loud, bright kitchen, all of them around us. My father’s gone. The show found whatever it was reaching for. My kids are under my roof or a phone call away. I’m home, and I stayed, and I’m going to keep staying.
Liam’s adventures as a call-in radio show host continues in DEAD AIR.
The Love Line is a hit, but success brings scrutiny—and not everyone calling in is who they claim to be. When a compelling caller turns out to be a complete fabrication, Liam must fight for his show's credibility while the band faces their biggest decision yet.