I listen to them talk on the phone as I make supper. He always has it on speaker phone. I prompt some of their conversation. Sometimes it is because I can sense he is running out of things to say to her, but other times it is because I am curious about her life. She has always been there but we’ve had little interaction of the years that I have known him. He asks about her first child, the one he never saw, the one who died of cystic fibrosis, I believe. The child’s remains are buried with his and her parents. And it was given the same name as his. Was that an act of fondness? She talked of going for walks with their father as a child. They walked to see another brother who was in a sanatorium with scarlet fever. I think my father had that as a child too. He was only two. She was four. Poor love. I had no idea. To be taken from your family at such a wee age. How did he make sense of it? And then he asked her how long her first born had lived. Six weeks, she said. They used to travel every other day to see him in hospital. They weren’t there when he died. We got a phone call, she said. It must’ve broken her heart. It still must.
