I let it ring.
A minute later, the little voicemail icon popped up.
I didn’t listen to it. I never listened to his voicemails. There were eleven of them in my phone, spread out over three years. Birthdays. Holidays. The anniversary of David’s death. I’d never opened a single one.
I put the phone face down on my desk and went back to work.
If I had listened to that one, everything would have been different. Or maybe not. Maybe it would have been exactly the same, except that I would have known. And I would have taken that moment away from my son.
I’ll never know which.
David was a police officer for sixteen years.
People sometimes hear that and imagine something dramatic. He wasn’t like the cops on TV. He mostly worked patrol in our part of town, which is quiet. He helped old ladies find their lost cats. He broke up fights outside the bars on Friday nights. He gave the same kids the same lecture about skateboarding in the bank parking lot about four hundred times, and he knew every one of them by name.
