I would speak to him, he would relay the message, and in the background I would make out her voice telling him what to say, which he would relay back to me. Sometimes I would ask him to put her on the phone and let her tell me whatever came to mind, because I missed her voice and wanted to hear her say the things she had always said to me, slurring her words a bit, ungrammatical, words that weren’t necessarily words even, just sounds that reached far back to my childhood, when I didn’t know words.
