Unanswered Phone Calls Quotes

You never let things go unanswered for too long. Emails. Phone calls. Questions. As if you know the waiting is the hardest part for me.

I recognized that my parents were older, and that some of that was my fault. The unanswered messages. The phone call from Dr K, in the early, early morning. Weren't those the things that aged people, more than the fact of time?

His mother’s people were from Memphis but had scattered after the war. He paced around the office, ignoring the looks from the secretary, and decided it was probably his mother. She had been sent away months earlier and the family was reeling. He and Stella had not seen her and their letters went unanswered. Their father refused to discuss his wife’s treatment, and, well, there were a lot of unknowns. Would her condition improve? Would she come home? Would the family ever be a real family again? Joel and Stella had questions, but their father preferred to talk about other matters when he chose to talk at all. Likewise, Aunt Florry was of little help. She called at 11:00 a.m. on the dot. The secretary handed Joel the phone and stepped around a corner, though probably within earshot,

talk about it. He went back to his office, musing on the fact that both he and Signorina Elettra worked for this unresponsive, negligent state. Because he’d been awake since two, Brunetti decided to treat himself well and walked down to Al Covo for lunch. On the way back, he gave thanks, as he always did, that the restaurant was only ten minutes from the Questura and never failed to send him back a new and happier man. Unfortunately, this new man was confronted with old problems: he called Professoressa Crosera’s telefonino but was told to leave a message; he called the hospital and received no information about Gasparini. He called Gasparini’s home number every hour, but the phone rang unanswered. Finally, at about five, he decided he had no choice but to pass by the hospital on his way home, and called Griffoni to tell her where he was going. He might as well have saved himself the effort: Professoressa Crosera was in her husband’s room, but when he went in and said good evening, she held her finger to her lips and pointed to her husband, lying now in a proper hospital bed. Brunetti indicated the door and the corridor beyond, but she shook her head and did not speak.

I could not know then that this was the last I would see of Tziri and Freidy for a long time. I could not know then that my many phone calls and letters would go unanswered, my messages unreturned. That for years, I would not know whether they even received my messages, or whether they were intercepted and discarded by those tasked with keeping their minds pure.