The Voiceover Artist by Dave Reidy

but just as urgently—with his eyes, this time—insisted I be silent.
    I listened, indignant at the idea that anything short of an emergency Presidential address could justify Simon’s shushing me this way. What I heard was a man telling me about a sale on bananas and a two-for-one deal on cans of Campbell’s Soup. It was a commercial for Jewel Food Stores. The voice belonged to Larry Sellers.
    I stayed silent until the commercial was over. Then I said, “Dinner’s ready.”
    Simon nodded, turned off his radio, and rolled off the bed onto his feet. As he passed me in the doorway, he put his arm around my back and leaned his head against my arm, a kind of half hug that offered more affection than I’d gotten from Simon since he entered junior high.
    As he walked away, I smiled at the possibility that, by introducing Simon to Larry Sellers, I’d done what few mothers who’d so poorly chosen a husband ever did: given my son a hero .
    I began to listen to Larry Sellers’ voice as closely as Simon did. I asked him questions about the voiceover artist’s style and technique, and Simon answered them as best he could with headshakes and nods. But my questions weren’t about Larry Sellers, really. They were about Simon. I came to treat the voice of Larry Sellers as a kind of surrogate for my son’s, as if the much older man’s speech—not what he said, but how he said it—could give me some idea of how Simon might sound if he could talk. The only voice I remembered as Simon’s was that of a little boy. And as Simon grew into a young man with acne on his shoulders and hair sprouting out of his Adam’s apple, my memory of that little voice faded until, when I lay awake in bed at night, with Frank snoring a few inches and a million miles away from me, I was no longer certain that the voice I heard so faintly in my mind’s ear had ever belonged to Simon.
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    THE DAY AFTER  Connor left for college, I left Frank.
    I moved out of the house to a one-bedroom apartment on the town square in Sampere. I offered Simon, who was twenty by then, my pullout couch and some space for his clothes, but he declined. The reason he gave me when I finally asked the right yes-no question was that he wanted to stay close to the Tippecanoe restaurant, in Leyton, where he’d worked for four years as a busboy. It’s just as likely that Simon believed moving in with me would look too much like surrendering to his father, and more likely still that Simon had come to depend on having Frank around to hate. It gave him a kind of energy. I had seen Simon silently stoke his hatred to get himself out of the house and off to work on the coldest, wettest days. For my part, I was tired of spending my days and nights hating Frank. I hoped Simon would tire of it, too. If he didn’t, his life would be a poorer version of his father’s.
    I sat in my Ford with the keys between my legs and my bulging suitcases in the back seats where my sons used to sit. As I steadied myself to leave Simon behind in the house where I’d raised him, I couldn’t reconcile these two ideas:   1 ) that I hadn’t failed Simon, and   2 ) that so many of my attempts to help Simon had failed.
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    I’D BEEN LIVING  on my own in Sampere for nearly three years when I came down with what my doctor suspected was a case of walking pneumonia. She drew some blood just to be sure and sent me on my way. A few days after that appointment, she asked me to come in for follow-up tests, which led to more tests and evidence that my walking pneumonia, which turned out to be cancer, had spread from my lungs to my lymph nodes, liver and bones. It was not long before I wasn’t walking at all anymore, but lying in a hospital bed in my apartment’s tiny living room.
    The morphine haze made me feel like I was dead already. The hospice