The first voicemail lasted nineteen seconds.
“Hi, sweetheart, this is your reminder to take the chicken out of the freezer before church. Also don’t trust those grapes in the fridge. They’ve turned on us.”
I stood in my kitchen staring at my phone and smiling like an idiot.
It had come from an unknown number.
Wrong number, obviously.
But the voice was warm and Southern and matter-of-fact in exactly the way my mother’s had been, and for one little moment, hearing a woman call somebody “sweetheart” and warn her about grapes felt like opening a window in a stuffy room.
My mother had been gone three years by then.
Long enough that the sharp pain had softened, but not long enough that I didn’t still miss her in all the ridiculous little places. At the grocery store when I reached for her favorite canned peaches. In the church pew when the alto line came in. On Sunday afternoons when I made roast chicken and wanted to ask whether she thought the potatoes needed ten more minutes.
So that voicemail landed hard.
I almost deleted it.
Instead, I listened to it twice.
The next day, there was another one.
“Baby, if you’re stopping by the drugstore, can you get the unscented lotion this time? The lavender one smells like a funeral home to me.”
I laughed out loud.
Then, because I am a grown woman with some manners, I called her back.
She answered on the second ring.
“Well, hello?”
“Hi,” I said. “I think you may have the wrong number. I’m not… whoever you’re trying to reach.”
There was a little pause.
Then she said, “Oh, mercy.”
Her voice was exactly the same as the voicemails. Soft, sure, and full of the kind of life that notices grapes.
“I am so sorry,” she said. “My daughter changed her number and I clearly wrote it down wrong because I was distracted by my neighbor’s peacock.”
I laughed. “Your neighbor has a peacock?”
“He does, and it has no respect for boundaries,” she said.
That was how I met Miss Loretta.
She was seventy-four, lived two towns over, and had one daughter named Janine, two arthritic knees, and strong opinions about lotion, produce, and doctors who “talk too fast and listen too little.”
I was fifty-eight, widowed, and still getting used to a house that echoed after dinner.
What started as me returning a wrong-number call somehow turned into a conversation that lasted twenty-eight minutes.
At one point she asked, “Do you cook?”
I said, “Enough to stay alive and comforted.”
She laughed and said, “Good. Then write this down. If your cornbread tastes dry, you’re being too proud with the buttermilk.”
I wrote it down.
That should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Three days later, another voicemail.
This time very clearly intended for me.
“Just checking on you. The weather looked gloomy and I thought you might need a nudge to make something warm for supper.”
I called her back laughing.
After that, we settled into the oddest, sweetest routine of my life.
Loretta left voicemails.
I called her back.
Sometimes we talked five minutes.
Sometimes forty.
Her messages were tiny gifts.
“Remember to buy stamps before you run out. Running out makes people feel more isolated than they need to.”
“Take your vitamins, even if they insult your dignity with how many there are.”
“I saw strawberries on sale and thought of you, though I don’t know if you even like strawberries. That’s all.”
I did like strawberries.
I began to look forward to being thought of in such small, specific ways.
Especially because my own life, while full in many respects, had gotten terribly quiet in the spaces nobody notices from the outside.
My daughter lived in Denver.
My son called often but briefly, usually while driving.
My friends were dear but busy.
And evenings had become the kind of stillness that can feel peaceful one day and too wide the next.
Loretta’s calls softened that.
Then one week she didn’t call.
Not Monday.
Not Tuesday.
Not Wednesday.
By Thursday afternoon, I realized I was worried.
I told myself that was ridiculous. She was a wrong-number woman in another town. I did not know her last name. I had no formal reason to be concerned.
Then my phone rang.
It was her.
“Before you fuss,” she said immediately, “I had a little hospital nonsense and forgot where I put my charger.”
I sat down so fast I nearly missed the chair.
“What happened?”
“Oh, nothing dramatic,” she said in a voice that absolutely meant at least some drama. “A blood pressure scare. They’ve sent me home with stern instructions and tasteless crackers.”
That was all I needed to hear.
I asked for her address.
She said, “Now don’t get carried away.”
I said, “Too late.”
The next morning, I drove to her town with a grocery bag full of things women know to bring.
Real crackers.
Chicken soup.
Good tea.
Fresh fruit.
A better lotion than lavender.
And a little potted mum because nobody should recover from “hospital nonsense” without something alive nearby.
She opened the door in a pale blue robe, looked at me for one second, and said, “Well. I suppose this is what I get for calling strangers sweetheart.”
I laughed and stepped inside.
Her house smelled like lemon oil and books. She had afghans on the couch, framed photos everywhere, and one ceramic chicken collection that made me instantly trust her more.
We spent the afternoon together.
I fixed lunch.
She complained about doctors.
We folded towels because apparently neither of us can sit with clean laundry nearby without addressing it.
She told me stories about Janine as a teenager and about the peacock next door, whose name was apparently Kevin and who had become “emotionally entitled.”
When I left, she hugged me hard and said, softly, “You came like family.”
That undid me a little.
Because it had been a long time since someone had said something like that and meant it.
After that, our odd little friendship became real in every way that mattered.
I drove over once a month.
We went to lunch sometimes.
She mailed me handwritten recipes with notes in the margins like:
Needs more pepper if weather is rude.
I helped her set up a doctor portal she hated on principle.
She taught me how to make coconut cake that didn’t dry out.
She called when my daughter had surgery.
I called when her peacock problem escalated.
Then last spring, I had a mammogram callback.
Nothing bad in the end, thank God.
But those days waiting for the extra imaging felt like walking around with a stone in my chest.
I hadn’t told many people.
I don’t know why.
Maybe because naming fear makes it louder.
The morning of the appointment, there was a knock at my door.
A florist delivery.
Inside the box was one small bouquet of yellow roses and a card in Loretta’s handwriting.
For whatever the doctors say,
Wear the good bra.
Breathe before parking.
And remember that waiting is not the same thing as losing.
Love,
Loretta
I sat at my kitchen counter and cried into the flowers.
Because how did she know exactly what kind of care I needed?
Then again, maybe that’s what older women do best.
Not solve.
Not rescue.
Just notice the practical shape of fear and answer it with something useful and tender.
Now it’s been four years since that first wrong-number voicemail about chicken and traitor grapes.
Loretta is eighty now.
She still leaves messages.
I still save some of them.
One says:
Take a sweater. Public buildings are run by men with no circulation issues.
Another:
If soup sounds good, trust that. Soup is wisdom.
And my favorite says:
You are not bothering the right people.
I listen to that one more than I probably should.
Because she’s right.
Sometimes love arrives by blood.
Sometimes by marriage.
And sometimes by one wrong number, one warm voice, and a woman old enough to know that the world goes easier if we keep checking on each other.
Source: Cheryl Purcell on Facebook
ai art by me
