There were fourteen, not nine.
Six from the home, including Denise and Angela, who came on her day off. Two neighbours from a street Eileen had left in 2011. A cousin’s daughter from Michigan. Kieran and his wife. A man in his eighties nobody could place who turned out to have worked with Martin Fahey in the seventies and had seen the notice in the paper.
And me.
Marjorie was not there. Marjorie was ninety-three by then and did not travel, and had sent, via Denise, a card, which I did not see and which Kieran told me afterwards said “SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLE” in enormous letters with nothing else in it at all, and which is the most Marjorie thing that has ever happened.
Kieran spoke. He was very good and very short.
He talked about her being funny. He said the thing everybody says about her being rude about people, and everyone from the home laughed in a way that told you it was true right to the end.
And near the finish he said this, and he had told me he was going to and I had still not been ready for it:
“For the last two years my grandmother rang someone every Sunday at six o’clock and had a proper conversation. She was completely herself for that twenty minutes. She was bossy and she was funny and she was extremely unfair about a woman called Marjorie, who I’d like to note is not here to defend herself.”
Then: “The person on the other end knew exactly what she was doing and did it anyway, for two years, for nothing. I’d like her to know that I think that’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for my family.”
I did not cry at that, which surprised me. I cried in the car park afterwards for about fifteen minutes with the engine off.
Denise found me before I left and gave me two things.
The first was a photograph. Eileen, maybe two years earlier, in the day room, in a green cardigan, mid-sentence, one hand up, clearly in the middle of telling somebody something. Denise said, “That’s her arguing. I thought you’d want her arguing.”
It’s the only picture I have of her and it is the correct one and I keep it on a shelf, not a wall, which is a distinction I can’t explain but is important to me.
The second thing was the number.
Denise wrote it on the back of a compliments slip — the home’s landline, the day room phone, the actual 419 number that had come up on my screen a hundred and thirteen times. She said, “In case you ever want to ring us. Not for anything. Just if you want to.”
I have called it twice. Once at Christmas that year and once the following spring, and both times I asked how everyone was and Angela told me, and both times it took me about an hour to get back to normal afterwards, and both times I was glad.
The number is still mine. I never changed it.
That took a while to be a decision rather than an omission. Around the six-month mark I sat and thought about it properly — there was an argument for a clean break, and there was a stronger argument, which is that a number that has been recycled once will be recycled again.
Somewhere out there is the next person who gets my number after me. And I found I badly did not want them to be handed, cold, with no warning, the thing that was handed to me: a voice at six on a Sunday asking about a roof.
So I keep it. It rings less, obviously.
Kieran and I still text. He has a daughter now, born last February, and she is called Eileen, which he told me by sending a photograph of a hospital bracelet and no message at all, and I sat in a break room at work and made a noise that concerned a colleague.
He asked me, when she was about a month old, whether I’d be around when she’s older — not a godmother thing, he was clear, just around — and I said yes.
That is the actual ending of this, and it’s a very quiet one. A man I met because I picked up a wrong number has a daughter named after the woman on the other end of it, and I’ll know her.
I still do something at six on Sundays.
Not deliberately, at first. I noticed about four months after the funeral that I was reliably in my kitchen at six on a Sunday with nothing scheduled, and that I’d been doing it for months, and that on the Sundays I wasn’t I felt faintly wrong all evening.
So now I do it on purpose. I call somebody. Not always the same person — my mother mostly, who is sixty-one and healthy and lives in Michigan and to whom I now speak approximately eleven times more than I did in 2021, and who has never asked why the change and has definitely noticed.
Sometimes it’s my brother. Sometimes it’s a friend I’ve been meaning to for a month and haven’t.
Twenty minutes. Nothing important in it. Somebody being rude about somebody else.
That’s the whole thing I took from Eileen Fahey and it isn’t complicated and it isn’t a lesson, exactly. Just that she was eighty-nine and she had almost nothing left and she still knew that six o’clock on Sunday is when you ring the person you love, and she went and did it, every week, into a phone in a day room, for eleven years, into what was for most of that time nothing at all.
She got an answer for two of them.
I’m glad it was me. I’ve stopped feeling that I need to justify that further.
Right. I’ll let you go.