Two years. That is how long a dead man’s voice can live inside a little beige plastic box on a kitchen counter.

Delbert had been gone twenty-four months, but every single time I walked past the pantry to grab the sugar or the flour, I heard him. His gravelly, no-nonsense drawl crackled out of the tiny speaker whenever somebody called to check on me, which was less and less often as the months dragged on.

You’ve reached the Prue place, we ain’t home right now, leave it after the beep. He said it just like that. Flat. Practical. Like he was reading off a lumber list at the hardware store.

Nadine, my daughter, hated that machine with a passion. She would stand right there by the refrigerator with her arms crossed over her chest, tapping her sneaker against the linoleum.

“Mama, you have got to unplug the thing,” she told me for the hundredth time last Tuesday morning, her voice sharp with that specific kind of worry that sounds a whole lot like irritation. “It is not healthy.

You are keeping a shrine to a recording. Dad has been gone since the spring before last. Let him go.”

“I am letting him go in my own time,” I told her, not looking up from the dish towel I was wringing out until my knuckles turned white.

“Your own time has been two years, Mama. The estate lady told you that you have to start getting rid of his things if you ever want the house to settle right. Change the message. Give away the flannel shirts. Cancel the second phone line.”

She wasn’t wrong. I knew she wasn’t. Nadine had her father’s stubborn streak mixed with my own anxiety, which made her about as subtle as a freight train when she thought someone needed fixing.

She left shortly after that, slamming the screen door just hard enough to make the glass rattle in its old wooden frame.

I stood there in the quiet kitchen for a long time. The house felt too big, the way it always did after she visited. Dust motes drifted lazily in the beam of sunlight cutting across the table. I looked over at the answering machine sitting next to the bread box. Delbert had bought it back in ninety-four when the old rotary phone finally gave up the ghost. It had little mechanical buttons that clicked down with a satisfying thud when you pressed them.

I walked over, my knees aching the way they always did when the weather shifted, and picked the heavy plastic box up in both hands. It felt lighter than I expected. Or maybe I was just tired of carrying everything else.

I sat down at the kitchen table, pulled the machine toward me, and blew a thick layer of gray dust off the top grill. There was a sliding plastic flap protecting the cassette door. I flicked it open with my thumb. Inside, the little clear plastic window showed the brown reels of tape sitting there, waiting.

I did not want to do it. Every instinct I had told me to slide the flap back shut, put the machine back by the pantry, and pretend Nadine had never brought it up. But the estate lady was right. The shirts were still hanging in the back of the closet smelling faintly of his old pipe tobacco and machine grease. The second phone line was still costing me thirty-four dollars a month just so his old fax number could ring into nowhere. I had to rip the bandage off sometime.

I plugged the power cord into the wall outlet beneath the calendar. The little red indicator light blinked on, steady and bright.

I reached out and pressed the record button. It clicked down with a hard, final sound.

I was supposed to clear the tape. I was supposed to speak into the tiny built-in microphone and record my own voice saying something normal and modern, something like, You’ve reached Ellie Prue, please leave a message. I opened my mouth to say the words.

That was when the machine gave a little mechanical cough, the gears whirring and grinding inside as the old magnetic tape caught on something, and a voice started playing.

It wasn’t the greeting. It was underneath it. A second track, recorded at a lower speed or layered over the top during some maintenance Delbert must have done years ago without me ever noticing.

I froze with my hand hovering over the stop button.

It was Delbert’s voice, but it sounded different. Closer. He wasn’t talking the way he talked when he was upright and running the tractor. He sounded tired, hollowed out the way he got during those final weeks in the hospice bed we dragged into the living room.

“Ellie,” he said.

The word hit me right in the chest so hard I actually gasped for air. I didn’t just hear the name; I heard the way he used to clear his throat right before he said it when he wanted me to hand him the wrench or pass the salt.

“If you’re hearing this,” his voice whispered out of that tiny tinny speaker, close to the receiver like he had cupped his hand around it to keep the nurses from hearing down the hall, “it means you finally got around to changing my message. Which means you’re doing all right. Which is all I wanted.”

I slid right off the wooden chair. My knees just gave out underneath me, and I went straight down onto the cold linoleum floor, my hands catching the edge of the lower cabinet to keep from tipping all the way over.

“Mama?” Nadine’s voice called from the front porch. She must have forgotten her car keys on the entry table. The screen door creaked open.

I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs to make a sound. I just sat there on the kitchen floor staring at the little beige box while Delbert’s dead voice kept talking to the empty room.

“I figured you’d be too stubborn to erase me for a good while,” his recorded voice muttered, slightly raspy, pausing to catch a breath that sounded painful even on the tape. “And if you’re ready to do it now, then you’ve healed up enough to hear from me one more time. I timed it that way on purpose because I knew you better than you ever gave me credit for, old girl.”

The dates started lining up in my head with a sick, dizzying speed. He had been in and out of the hospital that whole last spring, but there was a stretch in March, three weeks right before he took to the bed for good, when he swore up and down to the doctor that he was going to beat the cancer. He was still driving himself to his physical therapy appointments in town. He would have had the whole house to himself every single afternoon while I was down at the church committee meetings.

That sneaky, quiet man had planned this. He had sat at this exact kitchen counter, dying by inches and refusing to admit it to a soul, and he had rigged the machine. He had recorded a series of messages, hiding them under the main greeting so I would only find them on the exact day I finally worked up the courage to let his voice go.

There was more coming. I could hear the tape stretching and turning, the faint hiss of background static changing tone as the second block of audio began to play.

My hand reached out toward the stop button. My fingers were shaking so hard I could barely aim.

I made myself press it. I clicked the plastic square down, killing the sound instantly, plunging the kitchen back into a heavy, suffocating silence.

Nadine’s footsteps stopped in the hallway. “Mama? Are you in here? What fell?”

I stayed sitting on the floor with my back pressed against the lower cabinets, staring at the little red light that was still blinking at me. I didn’t want Nadine to see me like that. I didn’t want her asking questions I couldn’t answer without falling apart entirely.

“I’m fine, honey,” I called out, and my voice sounded like a stranger’s, thin and cracked around the edges. “Just dropped a coffee mug. Go on home, I’ll clean it up.”

I heard her hesitate by the door frame, her shadow stretching across the linoleum, before she finally muttered something about being back tomorrow and let the door swing shut.

When her car engine finally faded down the gravel driveway, I looked back down at the machine.

I understood it all in one sharp, agonizing flash. However much Delbert had left me on that tape, it wasn’t an infinite well. It was finite. It was measured out in blocks, tiny hidden parcels of his voice left behind like breadcrumbs in the dark. Once I listened to them all, once I played through whatever he had stashed on those magnetic ribbons, there would never be a single new word from my husband again for the rest of my days.

That reserved, stubborn, oil-changing man had figured out the one thing I would need most in the whole world two years after he was gone. He hadn’t left me a diary or a stack of Hallmark cards I would have thrown out in a grief-stricken fit. He had hidden twelve short messages, one for every single month of my first year alone, tucked away right inside the machine where he knew I wouldn’t go until the grief finally thinned out enough for me to touch it.

I reached out with a trembling finger and clicked the play button again.

“Month two,” his voice rasped out into the quiet kitchen, steady and low, as if he were sitting right across the table from me with his coffee cup between his hands. “If you made it this far without calling the plumber like I told you not to, you’re doing better than I thought. Check the trap under the sink, Ellie. There’s a spare washer taped to the PVC pipe. I love you.”