Please Stay on the Line
My father had the same landline from 1974 until the day he died. Same number, same beige phone on the kitchen wall with a cord you could stretch to the back door, same little pad of paper on a nail beside it. I grew up dialing that number from pay phones and dorm rooms and, later, from my cell, standing in airports, and he always answered on the third ring. Mercer residence. Like it was a business.
He died in April. I’m the only child, so I flew in, and after the funeral I spent a week in his house going through his life one drawer at a time. Closing things. The bank, the pension, the newspaper, the gas. Most of it was easy. You call, you say my father has passed away, and a person on the other end goes quiet and kind and tells you what to send.
The phone company was the last one, and it was not a person.
“Thank you for calling. Please say or enter the phone number of the account you’re calling about.”
I entered it, sitting at his kitchen table on my cell. The old phone hung on the wall beside me.
“Thank you. I see that account. For security, I need to speak with the account holder. Is the account holder available?”
“The account holder is deceased,” I said. “I’d like to cancel the service.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. To cancel service, I’ll need to speak with the account holder. Is the account holder available?”
I tried agent. I tried representative. I pressed zero eleven times. The system was very patient. Eventually it said, “Please hold while I transfer you,” and the hold music came on, a tinny, looping piano piece that sounded like it had been composed for an elevator in 1988.
“Your estimated wait time is: four minutes.”
That’s when the phone on the wall began to ring.
I want to be clear that the landline was still active. That was the point of the call. So I assumed it was a coincidence, a robocall, a neighbor who hadn’t heard. I let it ring. Three rings, and then the old answering machine on the counter clicked on and my father’s voice said, You’ve reached the Mercer residence, leave a message, and the beep, and then nothing. Just the hiss of an open line.
And under the hiss, very faint, I could hear a tinny, looping piano piece. The same one. In my ear, on the cell, and in the kitchen, on the machine. Perfectly in time.
“Your estimated wait time is: three minutes.”
I hung up the cell. The music on the machine stopped.
I sat there a long time. Then I called back. Entered the number. Is the account holder available? Transfer. Hold music.
The wall phone rang.
This time I picked it up. I don’t know why. I put my cell on speaker on the table and lifted the beige receiver off the hook, and held it to my other ear, and the hold music was there too, of course it was, in both ears. And something else, on the landline only: breathing. Someone else on the line, someone patient, waiting on hold, breathing slowly through his nose the way my father always did on the phone, the sound I’d heard on the third ring a thousand times before he said Mercer residence.
“Dad?”
The breathing stopped, as if to listen.
“Your estimated wait time is: two minutes.”
I put the receiver back on the hook. I didn’t hang up the cell. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. I sat in my father’s kitchen with the speaker on and listened to that piano going around and around, and I watched the phone on the wall.
It didn’t ring again. But the pad of paper on the nail beside it, the one he’d used for messages his whole life, had something written on it that hadn’t been there when I sat down. His handwriting. Square capitals, carpenter’s pencil.
STILL ON HOLD. THEY SAY NOT LONG NOW.
“Your estimated wait time is: one minute.”
You have to understand that my father spent the last two years of his life in that kitchen, mostly alone, because I lived two thousand miles away and called on Sundays, when I remembered. When he went into the hospital the last time, he kept asking the nurses to dial the house. He said he was waiting on a call. He said it was important. They thought he was confused.
I think now he was waiting on hold. I think he still is. I think when you die, there is a line, and you wait in it, and nobody tells you how long, and if there’s anything still connected back here, any number still active, you can hear it ringing through, and you can pick up.
“Thank you for holding. Your call is important to us. A representative will be with you shortly.”
I had my thumb on the red button. All I had to do was hang up and send the death certificate by mail, the way they did it in the old days. Close the account. Disconnect him.
“Thank you for holding. I’m showing that the account holder is present in the home. Can you put him on the line?”
I didn’t answer. The voice was different. It wasn’t the recording anymore. It was a person, a woman, very warm, very close to the microphone.
“Sir? I’m showing the account holder is present. We’ve been trying to reach him for some time. It’s about his transfer. He’s next.”
Behind me, on the wall, the beige phone lifted off its hook by itself and hung there, swinging gently at the end of its cord, the way it used to when he’d stretched it to the back door to watch the yard while he talked.
“Can you put him on, sir? Or would you like to take his place in the queue?”
I hung up. I hung up both phones, and I pulled the cord out of the wall jack, and I sat in my rental car in the driveway until morning. In the morning I mailed the death certificate to the phone company with a letter, and two weeks later I got a notice that the account was closed.
I went back to the house once more before the sale, to sign papers. I didn’t go into the kitchen. But on the way out I heard it from the front hall, through the kitchen door. A phone ringing. Three rings. The old machine clicking on.
The jack is still pulled out of the wall. The account is closed. It doesn’t matter. I could hear the hiss. I could hear the piano, very faint.
And I heard my father’s voice say, quite clearly, Mercer residence, and then, after a pause, in a voice I hadn’t heard him use since I was very small:
Son? You still there? It’s all right. I told them I’d wait. I told them I’d stay on the line as long as it takes, until you can come too.