He calls the house phone on Sundays

Rained all day Friday and I stayed in. Saturday it come up warm and I had the back door propped with the brick and ate a hoagie the boy brought me from the store on the corner. Italian, no onion.

We've had the house phone since December of 1977. Same number the whole time. A man come out from Bell of Pennsylvania in a truck and drilled the hole in the wall himself while Delores stood there telling him he was going to hit a pipe.

About once a year my daughter tells me I'm paying eleven dollars a month for nothing and I tell her she's probably right, and then I pay it again. It hangs by the refrigerator. Cord's long enough I can pull it over and sit down at the table, which is what I do. There's four people still breathing know that number and one of them is Leon.

Sundays I go to the eight o'clock and then come back here before the eleven, because I can't sit in a pew three hours running anymore without something happening in my back. Phone goes about quarter after ten. Been doing that six years.

Leon sang bass. So did I. We stood next to each other in that loft under two pastors and part of a third one, and I could get all the way down there back then. Can't now. I still get up and stand and I move my mouth on the low ones and let the young fellas have it.

In 1978 he had a car. A '71 Electra, gold, with the roof done in a darker gold than the rest of it. Wasn't but a few of us had a car. Rehearsal broke around nine thirty on Thursdays and Leon would run people home, and I lived four blocks the wrong way and I got in that car anyway.

The way he took me went down past the refinery and out along Penrose where you can pull off and sit and watch them come in low over the water into the airport. We'd sit out there an hour, hour and ten, and then he'd run me back up.

I was with the transit then. Thirty-four years altogether, mostly out at Elmwood on the trolleys, brake shoes and compressors. I had Thursday nights free because I traded a man named Pruitt my Saturdays for them, four years running, and I let him go on thinking he was getting over on me.

It went on about two years. What happened in that car happened and I'm not going to lay it out for you.

My daughter was born the October of 1980. After that I walked home from rehearsal.

And then the two of us stood next to each other about forty more years. Delores sang alto till her hip went and after that she sat third pew on the left where I could find her without looking around. My daughter's on the trustee board down there now. Vernell, that's Leon's wife, she ran the kitchen for the repasts and wouldn't let nobody else near the ham.

He sold that Electra in 1984 to a man on Sixty-Fifth Street and bought a station wagon because Vernell wanted one. I know the year because I helped him get the plates off it in the alley behind his mother's house and neither one of us said anything the whole time we were out there.

Delores went in 2016, the week before Thanksgiving. At the repast Leon stood in that kitchen line holding a pan of string beans in both hands for I don't know how long, waiting on somebody to tell him where to set it down. I could see him from where they had me sitting. Then a woman took it off him and he came over and put his hand on my shoulder and said all right then, and went and sat down with his wife.

Vernell went four years behind her, in the spring, when they wouldn't let but ten people in the building and the rest of us stood outside on Cedar Avenue in the rain and listened to it through the door. Leon's daughter's got a place out past Claymont with a room over the garage and she came up and got him that summer. He says the room is fine. She won't let him drive after dark and he's still hot about it two years later.

First time the phone went was a Sunday that October and he wanted to know was the church letting people back in yet. I told him fifty at a time and you had to sign a paper at the door. We talked eleven minutes. Next Sunday it went again about the same time and I was already in the kitchen.

Mostly it's his knee and what his daughter cooked. He'll tell me what they sang down there and I'll tell him what we sang here and one of us will say the tempo was wrong. Last week he told me she put fennel in a pork roast and he ate it and didn't say nothing to her about it. Twelve minutes. Fifteen. One time it went twenty-six and I came in behind the first hymn.

The middle grandson's been in the back room since January. Darius. Got baptized in that water same as his cousins. He's at the Community College doing heating and air, which I told him is the one trade that's never going out of business, and he says granddad I know, you've told me that.

He came in the kitchen one Sunday back in March while I had the phone. I kept talking. But I heard my own voice go and do something, get flat. He got his juice out the refrigerator and went on up.

Next Sunday he got up and went upstairs at ten after. Week after that, the same.

He did ask me one time who Mr. Tatum was. I told him a fella I used to sing with. He said okay and that was the end of it.

He hangs up first. He always did that, even in the car. I stand there holding it a second and then I put it back on the hook.

Then I put my hat on and go. Cane stays by the front door. I'll use it on them stairs at night and that's as far as that goes. Darius'll be up when I get back or he won't.

They got the sidewalk tore up on the corner since July. You have to go around by the lot and it don't add but a minute.