At My Late Husband’s Memorial Dinner, My Son-In-Law Raised His Glass And Said, “Ross Never Liked Me, Everybody Knows It.” So I Went To The Bedroom And Brought Back My Husband’s Old Flip Phone

My husband’s phone lives in the top drawer of his nightstand, plugged into a charger, between a roll of antacids and a pocket knife with a cracked bone handle.

It’s a silver flip phone from 2009. Ross refused to own anything else. Our daughter Rachel bought him a smartphone one Christmas and he used it as a paperweight in his workshop until the battery swelled up. “I don’t need a phone that’s smarter than me,” he said. “I need one I can drop off a ladder.”

He dropped that flip phone off a good many ladders. It has a scratch across the hinge and a beaded strap our granddaughter Nyla made him at summer camp when she was seven, red and white and blue beads, because she said he looked patriotic.

Ross died two Octobers ago, at seventy-one, in his recliner, during the second half of a football game. Peaceful, the way people say, and I suppose it was. I’m Odessa Merritt. I’m sixty-eight. We were married forty-four years.

I still pay fifteen dollars a month to keep his number. My daughter doesn’t know that. Sometimes, late, I call it from the kitchen phone just to hear the greeting. “This is Ross. Leave it at the beep.” That’s the whole thing. He never was a man for extra words.

That was the trouble, really. That’s what this whole story is about.

Ross and Marco

Our daughter married Marco Palumbo when she was twenty-four. Marco was loud, warm and Italian from Scranton, the kind of man who hugs the mailman. Ross was a tool-and-die maker from a family of Ohio farmers who shook hands like they were testing a fence post.

The first time Marco came to Sunday dinner, he brought a tray of his mother’s cannoli and talked for forty minutes straight about the Phillies. Ross listened, ate two cannoli and said, at the door, “Drive safe.”

In the car, I’m told, Marco asked Rachel, “Does your dad hate me?”

“He said drive safe,” Rachel told him. “That’s practically a parade.”

When Marco asked for Rachel’s hand, he did it properly, in our living room, standing up. Ross looked at him for a long time and said, “We’ll see.” Then he went out to the garage. Marco thought it was a no. It wasn’t. Ross came in an hour later and handed him a beer, which was a yes, but Marco didn’t speak that language yet, and I’m not sure he ever learned it.

Over the years there were other things. Ross skipped Marco’s fortieth birthday party because he’d promised to help a neighbor pour a slab that same Saturday. When Marco built a cedar deck on the back of their house, Ross came over the next morning, walked the whole thing with his hands behind his back, then got a drill out of his truck and replaced two screws by the steps.

Marco never forgot those two screws.

He brought it up at Thanksgiving that year, when Ross was out of the room getting more ice. “Your dad came over and redid my deck,” he said to me, smiling the kind of smile that isn’t one. “I worked on that thing for six weekends. He was there for twelve minutes.”

“He replaced two screws, honey,” I said.

“Exactly,” Marco said. “Two screws. He couldn’t leave it alone.”

When Ross came back with the ice, Marco went quiet and stayed quiet, which for Marco is like a car alarm going silent. Ross didn’t notice. Or if he noticed, he didn’t say anything, which with Ross amounts to the same thing.

“He couldn’t stand that I built something without him,” he told Rachel. “He had to fix it. He always has to fix it.”

I knew all of this. I heard it from my daughter, over the years, in pieces. I’d tell her, “Your father is just like that,” and she’d say, “I know, Mom, but Marco doesn’t.” And I let it go, because Ross was who he was, and I’d made my peace with a man who said “drive safe” when he meant a great deal more.

The Workshop

After Ross died, it was Marco who cleaned out the workshop.

I couldn’t do it. Rachel couldn’t either. That garage smelled like cutting oil and sawdust and Ross, and I’d open the side door and stand there and close it again. For three months it stayed exactly as he left it, with a half-finished birdhouse for Nyla clamped in the vise.

One Saturday in January, Marco showed up with a box of contractor bags and a thermos of coffee and said, “Odessa, you don’t have to come out. I’ll ask you about anything that matters.”

He spent three Saturdays out there. He sorted every drill bit by size. He labeled Ross’s coffee cans of screws. He came to the kitchen door every hour or so holding something up: a level, a box of letters, a little brass plane. “Keep or give?” And I’d tell him, and he’d nod and go back out.

He finished Nyla’s birdhouse. He didn’t tell anybody he was going to. He just glued the last piece of the roof on, painted it the same green Ross had started with, and hung it on the maple by her bedroom window.

I remember thinking, standing at the sink watching him do it, that if Ross could have seen that, he’d have said “nice job” and walked off, and Marco would have spent a week wondering what he meant.

The Second Anniversary Dinner

Every October since Ross died, I’ve had the family over on the Sunday closest to the date. I make his favorite things: hash brown casserole, ham, green beans with too much bacon, and the iced tea so sweet our dentist would weep. We set his framed picture at the end of the table. It’s the one of him in his fishing cap at Lake Erie, grinning like he’d just pulled up a walleye, which he had.

This year it was eleven of us. Rachel and Marco, their kids Porter, who is sixteen now and taller than his father, and Nyla, who is twelve. Ross’s younger brother Rudy and his wife Prue drove up from Mansfield. My sister. Two of Ross’s old friends from the shop.

It was a nice dinner. Mostly. Rudy had been working through a bottle of bourbon he’d brought, and he and Marco had been circling each other since the ham came out. They’ve never gotten along. Rudy is the kind of man who tells you what a thing cost before he tells you what it is.

After dessert I asked if anyone wanted to say something about Ross. That’s our tradition too. My sister told the story about Ross and the raccoon in the chimney. One of the shop men talked about the time Ross machined a part for a stranger’s wheelchair on his lunch break and wouldn’t take money.

Then Marco stood up.

He’d had a few glasses of wine. Not drunk. Just loose enough.

“I’ll say something,” he said, and lifted his glass. “Ross never liked me. Everybody at this table knows it. Twenty years, and I never once got it right with that man. But he loved my wife and he loved my kids, so here’s to him anyway.”

The Silence

Nobody drank.

Rachel said, “Marco,” very quietly. Porter stared at his plate. Nyla looked at me with her eyes huge, the way she did when she was little and someone broke a glass.

And then Rudy laughed. He leaned back in his chair and laughed.

“Well,” Rudy said, “at least the man’s honest. Ross wasn’t wrong about a lot of things.”

Prue put her hand on his arm. He shook it off.

Marco’s face went dark red. He set his glass down hard enough that tea sloshed out of Nyla’s. “You see?” he said, to Rachel, to the table. “Even his brother knows.”

I sat there with my napkin in my lap and felt something I hadn’t felt since the funeral. It was anger, and it was clean, and it was not at Marco.

Because I knew something nobody at that table knew.

I put my napkin down. “Excuse me a minute,” I said.

What Was in the Drawer

I walked down the hall to our bedroom. I could hear the table behind me, Rachel’s voice rising and falling, Rudy saying something that made Prue say “Rudy, stop.”

I opened the nightstand drawer and took out Ross’s phone.

I’d found the messages about two months after he died. I couldn’t sleep one night, and I sat on his side of the bed and opened that phone because I wanted to see his words. Any words. Ross hated texting. He typed with one big thumb on those little number keys, pressing each one three times to get the right letter, and it took him about a minute a sentence. So he only texted when he had to, or when it mattered.

Most of it was nothing. Running late. Need milk? Ok. But there was one long thread, the longest in the whole phone, with his brother.

I read it that night and cried until four in the morning. Then I put the phone back in the drawer and never told a soul, because it felt private. Because Ross had chosen not to say these things out loud, and I thought maybe that was his right. And because what Rudy had written in it was ugly, and I didn’t want to be the woman who started a war between brothers with one of them in the ground.

But Ross was in the ground. And Marco was standing at my table, believing for twenty years that a good man had despised him.

I flipped the phone open. The screen lit up, that old blue glow. I scrolled to the thread. Then I closed it again and carried it back down the hall.

“Read It Out Loud”

When I came back into the dining room, everybody went quiet. Marco was still standing. Rudy had poured himself another finger of bourbon.

I walked around the table and set the phone down on the tablecloth in front of Marco, next to his plate.

“What’s this?” he said.

“That’s Ross’s phone,” I said. “Open it. Go to messages. Find the one that says Rudy.”

Rudy put down his glass. “Odessa, what are you doing?”

“Sit down, Rudy,” I said. I have never in my life said that to my brother-in-law. Prue looked at me like I’d grown a second head. Rudy sat.

Marco picked up the phone. His hands, big hands, a press operator’s hands with old ink still in the creases, looked strange on that little silver thing. He fumbled with the keys. Porter leaned over and helped him, and the thread came up.

“Read it out loud,” I said. “From the top.”

The Thread

The first message was from Rudy, dated March 2018. I knew the date without looking. That was the month the printing plant closed, where Marco had worked for eleven years as a press operator.

Marco read it slowly.

“Heard your son-in-law lost his job. Told you. Your girl married a loser.”

He stopped. He looked across the table at Rudy. Rudy looked at his glass.

“Keep going,” I said.

“Ross wrote back,” Marco said. His voice had changed. “He’s not a loser. He’s out of work. Different thing.”

Next message. Rudy again. “He’s going to live off Rachel. Watch.”

Marco read Ross’s answer and had to start it twice.

“He was up at 5 today driving parts for the auto store. 2nd job this week. Hes at every one of Porters games. Watch your mouth about my son in law.”

No apostrophes. Ross never could find the apostrophe on that phone.

Rachel had her hand over her mouth.

2021

The thread went quiet for a few years. Then, in the summer of 2021, it picked up again. Marco scrolled down, squinting.

Rudy: “Saw the pictures of the deck. Bet you had to fix half of it.”

Ross: “2 screws. By the steps. So Rachel wont catch a heel. Rest of it is better than mine. Better than yours too.”

Marco set the phone down on the tablecloth for a second and looked at it. Then he picked it up again.

“Two screws,” he said, to nobody. “For her heels.”

He kept reading. Rudy, a little later that year: “Still don’t know what Rachel sees in that guy. Big mouth.”

And Ross’s answer was the longest message in the whole phone. I’ve read it so many times I know it by heart. It must have taken him ten minutes to type.

“I know what she sees. When Mom died he sat with me in the truck outside the funeral home for an hour and didnt say one word. You know how hard that is for him. He did it for me. He calls me Pop. Nobody ever called me that. Drop it Rudy. I mean it.”

Marco didn’t read the last line out loud. He couldn’t. Porter read it for him, very quietly, in that new deep voice he has. “Drop it Rudy. I mean it.”

Rudy

Nobody said anything for a long time. Prue was crying. My sister was crying. One of the shop men had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them on his shirt with tremendous concentration.

Rudy stood up. His chair scraped on the floor.

“That was private,” he said to me. “Those were private messages between me and my brother.”

“Yes,” I said. “And for six years your brother defended this man to you in private, and you sat here tonight and laughed while he believed Ross hated him. So I made it a little less private.”

Rudy opened his mouth. Then he looked at Marco, who was sitting now, holding that phone in both hands like it was something alive.

I want to be fair to Rudy. He’s not a monster. He’s a man who has been sour about other people’s luck his whole life, and he lost his only brother, and he was drunk. He stood there and his chin did something I hadn’t seen since he was a young man at our wedding.

“He did call you Pop?” he asked Marco.

Marco nodded. “Since the kids were born.”

Rudy picked up his car keys from the sideboard. Prue said, “I’ll drive.” He let her. At the door he stopped and said, without turning around, “I’m sorry, Marco.” Then he left. It was the first and only time I’ve ever heard Rudy Merritt apologize to anybody.

The Draft

When they were gone, Marco looked up at me with his eyes wet. “Why didn’t you show me this before? Two years, Odessa. Twenty years.”

“Because Ross didn’t show you,” I said. “I thought that was his choice. I was wrong. He was a stubborn old fool who said ‘drive safe’ when he meant ‘I love you,’ and I let him get away with it for forty-four years, and I let you pay for it.”

Then I said, “There’s one more thing. Go back. Hit the menu button. Then saved messages.”

He didn’t know what I meant. Nyla did. She leaned over and pressed the buttons, and a single draft came up. Never sent. Dated two days before Ross died.

It was addressed to Marco.

Marco read it to himself first. Then he turned the phone around and held it out across the table so Rachel could see. She read it and put her face in her hands.

So Porter read it out loud for everybody. It was short. Ross messages always were.

“Marco. Never said it right. Deck is holding up. Kids are good kids. Thats you. Proud of you son. Drive”

That’s where it ended. Drive. He never finished it. I suppose he got interrupted, or he went to find the apostrophe, or he decided he’d say it in person on Sunday. He didn’t make it to Sunday.

Afterward

We didn’t finish dessert. Marco sat at the end of the table next to Ross’s picture for a long time, the phone open in his hands, reading the thread over and over. At some point Rachel came and stood behind him with her arms around his shoulders. Nyla brought him a napkin. He laughed and said, “I’m fine, sweetheart,” and then he wasn’t, and she just kept handing him napkins.

Rachel found me in the kitchen afterward, scraping plates that didn’t need scraping.

“Mom,” she said. “Did Dad ever say any of that to you? Out loud?”

I thought about it. “Once,” I said. “After your wedding. We were driving home and he said, ‘That boy’s going to be all right.’ And then he turned on the radio.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s a speech, for your father.”

She laughed and cried at the same time and dried a plate with a dish towel that was already soaking wet. “Marco’s going to be impossible now,” she said. “He’s going to tell everybody he meets.”

“Good,” I said. “Somebody in this family ought to.”

Before they left that night, I tried to give him the phone.

He wouldn’t take it. “It’s yours,” he said. “It’s his. It lives in that drawer.”

“Then come read it whenever you want,” I said.

He does. About once a month, on a Sunday, he comes by on his own, without Rachel. He has a cup of coffee in my kitchen and goes down the hall and sits on Ross’s side of the bed and opens that drawer. He doesn’t stay long. Sometimes I hear him laugh at something. Once I heard him say, out loud, “Two screws, Pop. Come on.”

I still pay the fifteen dollars a month. Marco found out and tried to pay it for me. I let him pay half.

This October

This year, at the anniversary dinner, I made the hash brown casserole and the ham and the green beans with too much bacon. We set the fishing-cap picture at the end of the table. Rudy and Prue came. Rudy brought a bottle of wine instead of bourbon, and he shook Marco’s hand at the door and held it a second longer than he needed to. That’s the Merritt men for you.

When I asked if anyone wanted to say something about Ross, Marco stood up first.

“Ross liked me,” he said, and lifted his glass. “I have it in writing.”

And everybody drank.

I think about that unfinished word sometimes. Drive. I know what came next. Drive safe. That’s what Ross always said. For twenty years Marco thought it meant goodbye. It took a cheap silver phone in a nightstand drawer for any of us to understand that it never did.

If someone in your family says the important things in the smallest words, share this with them today. And tell me in the comments: did you have a “drive safe” person in your life?

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