The Sunday call

Sunday, so the call. Six o'clock, same as every week since 2019. It started as a practical thing when we moved down here — Sue Bennett is not a texter and my father is not a phone person, and without a fixed time it would have drifted to Christmas and birthdays inside a year. So we picked six on Sundays and it has not moved in seven years, including the week I had flu and the week they were in Maine. It is rarely a good conversation. That is not the point and I have stopped expecting it to be. Twenty minutes, mostly weather and the Wilcoxes and whatever Hannah has sent them a photo of. Tonight it was the gutters and a long passage about a man at the garage. But I know things about my parents that my friends do not know about theirs, and all of it arrived in twenty-minute increments about gutters. Danny has learned to be elsewhere at six on a Sunday. Not out of the house — just elsewhere, with the door open, and he always asks afterwards how Rich is, by name, which he has done every week for seven years.