I called my father back the same day

He leaves voicemails. Actual voicemails, thirty seconds, always ending with "no need to call back." For about a year I have been treating that last part as instructions. I listen, I think about it, I mean to call, and then it is Thursday and calling now would require explaining why I did not call Sunday, so it gets easier not to. Monday I called back within the hour. I had nothing to say. We talked about a leaking tap for eleven minutes and about nothing else, and then he said okay then, and hung up first, which he always does. I felt fine afterwards. Not warm, not moved. Just fine, the way you feel after doing a thing that was never actually hard. The uncomfortable version: I have been telling myself the distance between us is complicated. Some of it is. But a measurable part of it is that I let a polite sentence at the end of a voicemail do the deciding for a year.