My Stepdaughter Hauled Her Late Father’s Old Answering Machine To The Dump As “Junk.” I Drove Out And Dug It Out Of The Bin Before Closing, And The Tape Inside Held A Message He Recorded For Her On Her Wedding Night

Corrie pulled into my driveway at eight in the morning on the second Saturday in April with a rented utility trailer hitched behind her husband’s truck, and I knew before she got out what kind of day it was going to be.

Her father had been gone nine weeks. Dale died in his sleep in February, at seventy-one, in the recliner in the den with the Weather Channel on, which is exactly how he would have picked it if anybody had asked him. I’m sixty-six. We were married twenty-nine years. I was the second wife, and Corrie was fourteen when I arrived, and I don’t think she has ever entirely forgiven me for that, though in fairness I’m not sure what I’d have done differently.

“We’ll start with the garage,” she said, already walking. “Brady has to be at Ava’s soccer at one.”

Brady gave me an apologetic look over the hood of the truck. Brady Fortner is a big quiet man who sells insurance and who learned long ago that the fastest way through a day with his wife is straight through it.

I had agreed to this. Two weeks earlier Corrie had called and said she wanted her father’s tools and that she’d “help me get rid of the rest” while she was at it. I said yes because she was his daughter and because the garage scared me. I hadn’t gone in there since February. His reading glasses were still on the workbench.

Dale’s Shop

You need to understand what the garage was.

For thirty-one years, on top of his job at the county road department, Dale ran a small engine repair business out of the back half of our two-car garage. Mowers and snowblowers, mostly. He had a hand-painted sign on the mailbox post and a separate phone line out there, which he insisted on because, he said, a man’s customers shouldn’t have to talk to his wife about carburetors. I think he just liked having his own phone.

That phone line ran to an answering machine on the shelf above the workbench. A beige plastic thing from about 1994, with a coiled cord and a little cassette door on top and a red light that blinked when somebody had called. He never replaced it, even after the rest of the world went to voicemail. People in town knew that if you wanted your snowblower looked at, you called the shop line and talked to the tape.

He kept it plugged in long after he mostly stopped fixing mowers. When I asked him once why we were paying for a phone line nobody called, he said, “Somebody calls,” and went back to whatever he was doing.

So. That was the garage.

Corrie Sorts

Corrie sorted fast. She had a roll of blue painter’s tape and she put a strip on everything she was taking. The drill press. The chest. The good sockets. A framed photo of Dale and his father with a twelve-pound walleye, which I was glad she wanted.

Everything else went into the trailer.

I watched coffee cans of mixed screws go into the trailer, and a stack of repair magazines from the eighties. I didn’t argue. A lot of it was junk. Dale would have said so himself, while putting it back on the shelf.

Then she reached up over the workbench and unplugged the answering machine.

“Corrie, wait. That’s his phone.”

She looked at it in her hands like I’d told her it was a live grenade. “Faye. It’s an answering machine from the nineties.”

“It’s the shop line.”

“There is no shop. Dad hasn’t fixed a mower in five years.” She wound the cord around it in three quick loops. “Who’s going to call? You’re paying the phone company forty dollars a month for a tape recorder. I already called and canceled the line. You’re welcome.”

“You canceled it?”

“Last week. It was on the bill.” She tossed the machine into a cardboard box with a dead fluorescent tube and a broken weed trimmer head. “It’s junk. You keep everything like it’s the Smithsonian. Dad’s not in the stuff, Faye.”

I opened my mouth, and then Brady came around the side of the trailer and said, “Cor, the drill press needs both of us,” and she went to help him, and the moment closed up like water.

I went into the house. I’m not proud of that. I stood in the kitchen and told myself she was right. It was a machine, and the line was already dead.

At eleven-thirty they drove the trailer to the county transfer station on Route 9, and by twelve-forty they’d left for soccer with the drill press strapped in the truck bed.

The Empty Shelf

I didn’t go into the garage again until four o’clock.

I went in to turn off the light they’d left on, and stood with my hand on the switch looking at the bare shelf. You could see the clean rectangle in the dust where the machine had sat for thirty-two years.

And I thought about New Year’s.

Every New Year’s Day since I’d known him, Dale did one strange thing. Around ten in the morning, after his coffee, he’d pick up the kitchen phone and call his own shop line. I’d hear the machine click on out in the garage through the wall, faintly, his own voice saying You’ve reached Dale’s Small Engine, leave it at the beep, and then he’d talk for a minute or two. He’d shut the kitchen door while he did it. When I asked the first year, he said, “Just checking in with the shop.” When I asked the second year, he said, “Leaving myself a note.” By the fifth year, I’d stopped asking. It was just a thing he did, like salting his watermelon.

I had never heard what he said. Not once. I’d assumed, when I thought about it at all, that he erased them.

I looked at my watch. The transfer station closes at five on Saturdays.

I didn’t change my shoes.

Route 9 at 4:38

The Clement County transfer station sits on a gravel lot eleven miles from our house, past the feed store. I drove it in fourteen minutes in Dale’s old Buick, which I’d been meaning to sell, and which I have since decided to keep.

The attendant in the booth was a man in his seventies named Amos, in a Carhartt jacket and a knit cap, with a clipboard and a space heater. He knew me. Everybody in Clement County who ever needed a mower fixed knew Dale, and so they knew me.

“Mrs. Ainsworth. We close in twenty.”

“Amos, my stepdaughter brought a load in around noon. Rented trailer, white Ford pickup. There was an answering machine in it. A beige one. I need it back.”

“Household goes in the compactor,” he said slowly. “But electronics go in the cage. State law. You can’t throw that stuff in with the regular.”

“Where’s the cage?”

He pointed with his pen at a fenced enclosure by the far corner, about the size of a one-car garage, with a padlock hanging open on the gate. Inside it were stacked old televisions and computer monitors and microwaves and printers, a big tangled hill of beige and black plastic.

“They pick it up Mondays,” he said. “You’re welcome to look. I’ll get you some gloves.”

The Cage

I’d like to tell you I found it right away.

It took me twenty-six minutes. Amos let me go past closing. Now and then he pointed and said, “What about that one?” and it never was.

I moved two VCRs and crawled around a rear-projection television I could not move at all. I found three other answering machines and knew right away none of them was his. His had a scratch across the top in the shape of a check mark, where Dale had dropped a carburetor on it in 1999.

At 5:22, under a microwave with the door hanging off, in the same cardboard box with the dead fluorescent tube and the broken weed trimmer head, I found it.

I sat down right there on the gravel with the box in my lap and held the machine with both hands and looked at the little check-mark scratch, and the cord still wound in Corrie’s three quick loops.

Amos came in and squatted down beside me. He didn’t say anything for a while.

“Dale fixed my wife’s tiller,” he said finally. “Twice. Wouldn’t take money the second time. Said the first fix should have held.”

“That sounds like him.”

“He around the shop much, at the end?”

“Every day,” I said. “He just didn’t fix anything.”

Amos nodded like that made perfect sense to him. He helped me up. He carried the box to the Buick and set it on the passenger seat and buckled the seat belt over it, very seriously, and I laughed for the first time in what felt like a month.

It Won’t Play

When I got home I put the machine on the kitchen table. I washed the dust off the plastic with a damp dish towel. I opened the little cassette door, and the tape was there, a standard cassette, clear plastic, no label at all.

I plugged it in and pressed the play button, worn smooth from thirty years of Dale’s thumb.

The machine made a sound like a coffee grinder with a stone in it, and the cassette didn’t move.

I tried again. Same sound. I unplugged it before I broke something, and I sat at the kitchen table until it got dark and I had to get up to turn on the light.

The only other cassette player we owned was in the Buick, and I was afraid it would eat the tape. Some tapes you only get one try with.

Elmer Beddoe

On Monday I took it to Elmer Beddoe.

Elmer is eighty and ran a radio and television repair shop on Cottage Street from 1968 until 2011, when he says people stopped fixing things and started replacing them, “which is a different hobby.” He still has a bench in his basement and a wall of tiny drawers. Dale used to buy him coffee at the Elmwood diner on Thursdays, and they’d argue about the Tigers.

Elmer’s wife Bea let me in. She took one look at what I was carrying and said, “Oh, honey,” and took my coat.

Elmer had me set it on his bench under a magnifying lamp. He opened the case with a little screwdriver in about forty seconds.

“Belt,” he said. “Drive belt’s turned to taffy. Happens after twenty years. Rubber gives up.” “Dale’s?”

“The shop line.”

“Huh.” He started opening his little drawers. “I told him to replace this thing in 2004. He said it worked fine. I said it’ll work fine until it doesn’t. He said that’s true of everybody.”

He found a belt that fit in the fourth drawer, closed up the case, and plugged it in. Then he looked at me.

“You want to be alone for this?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I think I want somebody in the room.”

New Year’s, 1998

He rewound the tape to the start. The machine whirred, smoothly this time, and clicked.

And then, in Elmer Beddoe’s basement, under a magnifying lamp, my husband’s voice came out of that little speaker.

“Happy New Year, shop. It’s January first, 1998. It’s eleven degrees. Married the best woman in Clement County in October and her daughter, my daughter, hates her guts, but she’ll come around. Corrie’s fourteen. Fourteen’s hard. Got a Toro and two Ariens in the back waiting on parts. Okay. Bye.”

Beep.

Elmer didn’t say anything. I put my hand over my mouth.

“Happy New Year, shop. 1999. Faye made a ham. Corrie came for Christmas Eve and stayed until almost ten. She laughed at one of Faye’s jokes and then got mad at herself for laughing. Progress. I dropped a carburetor on the machine. Sorry, machine.”

Beep.

He’d done it every year. Every New Year’s Day, for twenty-eight years, he called his own shop and told the tape what was going on. Never longer than a minute or two. Corrie’s high school graduation, when he said, “She looked right at me when she got her diploma. Right at me. I’ll take it.” The ice storm year, when he ran the generator for three neighbors and slept in the garage.

I heard myself in there over and over. “Faye’s mad at me about the gutters.” “Faye’s taking a pottery class and everything in the house is a lopsided bowl.” “Faye says I should go to the doctor about my knee. I’m not going.” “Faye’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’m saying that to a tape recorder because I’m a coward.”

Elmer handed me a box of tissues from somewhere under the bench. He didn’t look at me while he did it, which was the kindest thing anybody did for me that whole spring.

I had always wondered what he said in there with the kitchen door closed. He was talking about us. He was talking about all of us, every year, to nobody.

October 17, 2009

The New Year’s messages ran in order. Then, in the middle of the tape, between New Year’s 2009 and New Year’s 2010, there was one that wasn’t on New Year’s.

“It’s October seventeenth, 2009,” Dale’s voice said. It was quieter than the others. You could hear crickets behind it, and a car going by. “This one isn’t for the shop. This one’s for Corrie.”

Elmer reached out and pressed stop.

I looked at him. He looked back at me over his glasses.

“That one’s not yours, Faye,” he said gently. “Or mine.”

He was right. I knew the date. October 17, 2009, was the day Corrie married Brady Fortner at the Lutheran church in Elmwood. She was twenty-six. She asked her mother’s husband, Cliff Easley, to walk her down the aisle, because Cliff had been the one at the bus stop every morning when Dale worked the night plow shifts, and because she was angry at her father for a hundred reasons that had piled up since she was fourteen, at least half of which were about me.

Dale sat in the third pew. He didn’t make a fuss. He gave a nice card with a check in it. At the reception, he was supposed to give a short toast after Cliff’s, and the DJ ran long, and the toasts got cut, and he never gave it. He went outside afterward and sat in the truck in the parking lot for a long while. I knew that much. I was the one who went out and got him.

What I hadn’t known was that he’d called the shop from the truck.

I took the tape out of the machine and put it in my coat pocket, and I thanked Elmer, and he wouldn’t take a dime. “The first fix should have held,” he said, and I didn’t understand what he meant until I was halfway home.

The Phone Call

I called Corrie that night. She picked up on the fifth ring, and she sounded tired, and there was a TV going.

“I went to the transfer station,” I said. “Saturday. I got the answering machine back.”

“You went to the dump.” I could hear her deciding whether to be angry. “Faye, are you okay? Like, actually? If you’re out digging through garbage…”

“There’s something on the tape that belongs to you,” I said. “Your dad made it. I haven’t listened to it. I’d like you to come over and hear it. Sunday, if you can.”

A long silence.

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know. I stopped it before it started. It’s from your wedding day.”

I heard her breathe in. Then she said, “Sunday,” and hung up without saying goodbye. That was all right. I don’t always say goodbye either.

Sunday at the Kitchen Table

She came at two, alone except for Ava, who is twelve and has Dale’s chin and who had clearly been told to stay in the car and had clearly decided not to.

I had the machine on the kitchen table, plugged in, cord trailing to the outlet by the toaster. The cassette was in it, cued to October 17, 2009. I’d put out the good mugs.

She sat down across from it and didn’t touch the mug.

“It’s really the same machine,” she said. “There’s the scratch.”

“He dropped a carburetor on it. 1999.”

“I know. I was there.” She almost smiled. “He swore so loud the neighbors’ dog started barking.”

I explained the New Year’s tapes, quickly. I said I’d give her a copy of all of it if she wanted. Then I showed her the play button, and I told Ava to come help me with something on the porch, and Ava, to her credit, came.

We sat on the porch swing. Ava asked if Grandpa was funny on the tape. I said he swore at the machine in 1999, and she thought that was the best thing she’d ever heard.

Through the kitchen window, I could hear the murmur of Dale’s voice, and then nothing for a while, and then his voice again.

It took twenty minutes. I timed it by the church bell at St. Bede’s, which rings the quarter hours. When the back door opened, Corrie came out with her face wet and her mascara gone, holding the cassette in both hands like it was hot.

She sat down on the porch step below the swing, with her back to me. Ava looked at me. I shook my head a little, and Ava, who is going to be a remarkable woman, went inside to get her mother a glass of water without being asked.

What He Said

Corrie told me what was on it. I didn’t ask her to. She just started talking to the yard.

“He said he was in the parking lot. He said the DJ cut the toasts and he was relieved, because he was going to mess it up, so he’d say it to the shop instead, and maybe I’d hear it someday or maybe not.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “He said he wasn’t mad about Cliff. He said Cliff earned it. He said Cliff was at the bus stop every single morning when he was out on the plow and he was grateful, and he was going to tell Cliff so, and he did, I guess. I didn’t know that. Cliff never told me.”

I didn’t say anything. Elmer had taught me that, anyway.

“He said he was proud of me. He said the thing about Brady being a good man, which he always said, like Brady’s a used truck. He talked about when I was little, and he used to take me to the shop on Saturdays and let me hold the flashlight, and I was always pointing it at the wrong place.” She laughed, and it came out broken. “And then at the end he said…”

She stopped. She turned around on the step and looked up at me for the first time.

“He said, ‘Be nice to Faye. She’s the one who made me come today. I wasn’t going to. She ironed my shirt and drove me there and sat next to me in the pew. You don’t have to love her. Just be nice to her. She’s been nice to you for twelve years and you’ve never once made it easy.'”

The church bell rang the half hour.

“Is that true?” Corrie said. “That you made him come?”

I thought about lying. It would have been easier, and kinder to Dale in a way. But Dale had already told her, and I’d been married to him too long to contradict him on his own tape.

“He was hurt,” I said. “About Cliff. He said he’d send a card and stay home. I told him if he stayed home, he’d regret it every day for the rest of his life, and he’d tell me so every day for the rest of mine. So I ironed his shirt.”

Corrie looked at the cassette in her hands for a long time.

“I threw it in the dump,” she said. “I called it junk. I said Dad wasn’t in the stuff.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I didn’t ask.” She pressed her lips together hard. “I never ask you anything, Faye. Twenty-nine years. I never once asked.”

Ava came back out with the glass of water and set it beside her mother on the step. Corrie took it and drank half of it and put it down.

“Can I keep this?” she asked. “The tape?”

“It’s yours,” I said. “It was always yours. I’d like a copy of the New Year’s ones, if that’s all right. I’m in some of them.”

“You’re in all of them,” she said. “He says your name every single year. I fast-forwarded through some to find mine. You’re in every one.”

The Copy

Ava fixed the copy problem in about four minutes, because she’s twelve. She recorded the whole tape into her phone off the machine’s little speaker, sitting cross-legged on my kitchen floor with the phone held right up to it, shushing both of us whenever we breathed. Then she sent the file to her mother, to me, and to Elmer, whose wife Bea played it for him on her phone.

Corrie took the cassette home in a sandwich bag in her purse. She keeps it in her jewelry box now.

The following Saturday she came back. No trailer. She brought Brady and a box of donuts and the blue painter’s tape, and she stood in the garage doorway and said, “I want to do this right. Can you tell me what things are before I decide?”

So I did. It took all day. She found Dale’s old flashlight in the bottom drawer of the workbench, the big yellow one, and she sat down on an upturned bucket and held it in her lap for a while without turning it on.

The answering machine went back up on the shelf above the workbench, into its clean rectangle in the dust. I called the phone company that Monday and had them turn the line back on. Forty-one dollars a month. Corrie offered to split it. I told her no.

New Year’s Day

This past January first, around ten in the morning, after my coffee, I picked up the kitchen phone and dialed the shop.

Out in the garage, through the wall, I heard the machine click on, and Dale’s voice say You’ve reached Dale’s Small Engine, leave it at the beep. I hadn’t changed the greeting. I’m never going to.

I closed the kitchen door.

“Happy New Year, shop,” I said. “It’s Faye. It’s nineteen degrees. Corrie and Brady came for Christmas Eve and stayed until after eleven. Ava wants to learn to fix a mower. I told her I’d find someone. Elmer says he’s too old, and then he said yes.”

I stopped. I didn’t know how to end it. Dale always knew.

“Okay,” I said. “Bye.”

At 10:20 that same morning, while I was washing my mug, the red light on the machine started blinking. I went out to the garage in my slippers and pressed play.

“Happy New Year, shop,” said Corrie’s voice. “It’s me. I’m going to do this every year now, I think. Faye made a ham. Don’t tell her I said it was good.”

Beep.

If you’ve ever thrown out something that turned out to be someone’s whole heart, you know there’s sometimes still time to go get it. Pass this along to someone who keeps the old things for a reason.

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