I let it ring three times before I picked it up.
“Hey,” a man said. It was a voice I didn’t recognize, so I waited for him to say something else before I answered him. “Hello.” The pitch of his voice went up a little on the o. “Somebody there?” The man spoke in a gruff, southern accent, definitely a Wiregrass accent, so I thought he might be someone my mom knew.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hayes there?”
“What?” I said.
“Hayes. I’m looking for Hayes. He there?”
“No, sir.”
“You know when he’ll be back?” The man coughed. It was a cough that sounded about twenty thousand cigarettes deep. “Ma’am?” he added after a cautious pause.
“He doesn’t live here, sir.”
“That don’t matter. He’s over there a lot, ain’t he?”
“Sometimes.” I let out a breath, wondering if I’d made a mistake admitting this. “I don’t understand what you want.” I forced myself to leave off the sir at the end.
“How about,” he said, “you just give me the address where you are.”
“If you’re looking for him, why don’t you go to his house? That’s usually what people do when they’re trying to find somebody. Not call a stranger’s house asking after street addresses they have no business with.”
This made him laugh until he coughed again, and then he coughed until he brought up something he felt the need to hawk and spit. The thick, wet sound of it came out of his mouth and through the phone lines. Then he hung up.