They Never Picked Up My Calls, So I Made Dolls That Answer novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Loft

Gus gives Elsie the loft over his garage, together they build the first doll that answers, Elsie chooses the school near the people who showed up, and seven years later Gus collapses on the workshop floor.

I knocked on Gus's door with the notice in my hand.

He read it with his glasses on the end of his nose.

"Nine days," he said.

"I've got a job at the diner on Seventh. Weekends. It's not enough for first and last month anywhere."

He folded the notice in half.

"Come downstairs."

Behind the building was a cinder-block garage I'd always thought was storage.

He rolled the door up.

A lathe. A drill press. A long steel workbench. Pegboards of tools, every one outlined in marker so you'd know where it went home.

It smelled like oil and cut metal.

"Thirty-four years at the aircraft plant," Gus said. "Retired. Now I fix lawnmowers for the neighbors and swear at the radio."

He pointed up a wooden staircase.

At the top was a loft. One window, a cot, a sink, a little window unit air conditioner.

"My wife's sewing room," he said. "Her machine's still up there. I can't sell it and I can't look at it."

A black Singer sat under a dust cover by the window.

"The air works," he said. "No rent. You sweep the shop and help me with the small wiring, my eyes are going."

"Why?"

He shrugged his big shoulders.

"Because nobody answered when you called. I heard you calling."

I moved in on the twenty-eighth with two suitcases and Grandma's tin.

The four dolls went in a shoebox under the cot.

I couldn't throw them out. I couldn't look at them either.

The first week, I swept and learned the names of things.

The second week, Gus taught me to solder.

"Tin the tip. Don't breathe the smoke. Steady hands." He watched me. "You got steady hands."

Down the hall from my old studio lived a mother who worked nights as a hospital cleaner.

Her son was three.

Every night at nine she left, and the neighbor who watched him said he cried until he fell asleep against the door.

I heard him too, all last year.

One night I asked Gus what was inside a talking greeting card.

He pulled one apart for me on the bench.

A coin battery. A chip the size of a fingernail. A tiny speaker.

"Ten seconds of sound," he said. "Cheap as dirt."

"Could you make it hold a minute?"

He looked at me over his glasses.

"What for?"

I told him.

We spent two weeks on it.

I sewed a soft cloth doll, fourteen inches, and filled the body with glass beads so it had weight.

I cut a red felt heart and stitched it on the chest over the button.

Gus built the board, and I learned to flash the chip at his kitchen table.

When we tested the first one, he leaned down and pressed record.

"Testing. Good seams, kid."

I laughed so hard I had to sit on the floor.

"You're leaving that in," he said.

"I'm hiding it," I said. "Hold the heart ten seconds and you'll hear it. Every doll. Forever."

"That's dumb," he said, pleased.

The boy's mother recorded herself singing the first verse of a lullaby.

She pressed the heart and heard her own voice come out of it and covered her mouth.

That night at nine the hallway was quiet.

In December the emails came.

Drew's school in Boston. Full ride.

The state university in Tempe. Full ride, engineering, honors housing I didn't need.

I sat on the cot with my laptop for a long time.

Boston was what I'd wanted my whole life.

Boston was also where every person I'd called that first night lived now.

Downstairs Gus was swearing at a carburetor.

The boy from down the hall was asleep with his doll.

I clicked accept on Tempe.

Then I went down and told Gus, and he pretended he had something in his eye.

In March, the boy's mother came to the shop.

A nurse on the pediatric ward at the children's hospital had seen the doll in her bag.

"She wants to know if you can make forty," she said.

I could.

At nineteen I filed the papers myself and called it Keepsake Dolls.

At twenty-two I walked across a stage in Tempe with a mechanical engineering degree.

Gus was in the front row in a borrowed tie, clapping.

Nobody else came.

I didn't look for them.

At twenty-three we hung a wooden sign over the garage door.

KEEPSAKE DOLLS. GUS DEMPSEY & ELSIE CALVERT.

Seven years after the night I set my key on Gracie's gift, I stood at the foot of a hospital bed on the fourth floor.

A boy with a shaved head and a port in his chest was hugging an Answer Doll.

His mother had gone home to sleep for the first time in a week.

He pressed the red heart.

"Goodnight, buddy. I'll be here when you wake up. I love you to the moon."

He closed his eyes and smiled.

The ward nurse squeezed my arm.

"Three hundred," she whispered. "Three hundred kids on this floor alone."

I drove back to the shop with the windows down, humming.

Two of our three sewers were at their machines. Gus was at the bench, testing boards.

"Ward loves them," I called. "She wants the new run by Friday."

"Course she does," Gus said. "Good seams."

He stood up.

He put one hand flat on the bench.

Then the board he was holding slid out of his fingers, and Gus went down on the concrete floor with his other hand clutching his chest.

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