“Él está haciendo la tarea?… puedo hablar con él?… por favor!... Henry?”

Across the hall, I heard my name. A voice surrounded my room with the sharp echoes of accented letters and stressed vowels. It was Nono Luciano, my grandfather, who called my dad each Friday afternoon. He waited hours until the clock struck eleven, and dialed my father’s number through the vintage black phone attached to the wall of his house.

“Henry, ven al teléfono!” My dad implored not so sweetly for me to come speak with Nono. Rather than politely requesting for me to come to the kitchen, my father used his stern voice to demand that I speak with Nono “This instant!”

I heard my grandfather’s voice from the phone, like a broken and irritating record that looped in my brain.

I decided to mute the volume in my mind and turn my energy back to the all-important Buzzfeed quiz on "Which Disney Characters are YOU?"

“Henry! Ven al teléfono!”

I waited. I then let out a staged groan for my audience’s benefit in hopes that my father would hear my cries. I replied, sullenly, “I’m doing homework!”

My dad, with his sorrowful expression, mumbled, “Again?”

I heard Nono Luciano’s voice answering from the phone. It was surprisingly loud for a seventy-two-year- old Spanish man who did nothing but sit in silence while tending his villa garden. As he described his day to my father, I could picture Nono eagerly waiting for my grandmother on a late Sunday afternoon, only for him to leave the Castelar elderly home an hour after his arrival. I still see the shadow-stained eyes which turned into light pastels the minute my father and I arrived at the Barcelona International airport ten years ago. Nono is nothing more than the memory of a smile fading from a tiny crack beneath my sevenyear-old brain. Now, more than ever, my grandfather is a stranger.

Nono asked my father in his classic Spanglish, “when will... el family...visit?” From the slight breaks and sighs formed by my grandfather’s breaths, I could tell that he was afraid to receive an answer, the truth. But before my dad could speak, Nono responded to the silence by saying, “No pasa nada mi chico… No pasa nada.”

My grandfather suddenly stopped employing the same enthusiasm that he had used previously in the conversation. Instead, he slowed his words and hesitated, with long “uhm”s and “eh”s whenever my father mentioned spending time with our family. I could see the crescent-shaped smile on my father’s face slowly disappear behind the sky’s thick fog. He wasn’t necessarily upset because he heard the dis- appointment in his father’s breaths, but because he knew he was the one who had left his father alone for all these years.

The room went quiet. Nono told my father that it was getting quite late in Castelar. I pictured Nono's eyes staring at the blank white ceiling with no one sleeping beside him. He would be tucked in a wool blanket, asleep in the dark- ness, and alone on another night full of nothing but empty silence.

In this moment where I avoided “The Call with Nono,” I continued with my laborious task of taking the Buzzfeed quiz: “Guess Which Celebrity is Which: Lip Edition.” That is, until my father demanded that I “go to the kitchen this instant!”

I responded by telling him “No Dad! I am doing Geometry homework! How do you not care about my academic success? You are, like, so selfish!” I thought if I lied I could get myself out of this situation, but when my father gave me the option between discussing life with Nono or taking my laptop for an entire week, I knew what I had to do.

I trudged across the wooden floors like a condemned criminal and slumped into my pathetic “time out” kitchen chair like a runny egg sliding out of a pan. The look on my face was one of dark disgruntlement. The disapproval emanating from my father’s judging eyes penetrated my pathetic eye roll, a futile attempt at teen aloofness. He knew he had won this battle.

“Hola? Henry?”

I replied to my grandfather with a bland “Hola Nono.” I ended each sentence with an apathetic “yeah” and a sarcastic “got it!” to further prove my teenage stubbornness. Holding the phone, my father told me exactly what to say by silently mouthing out every word. It was as if we were cheating in the world’s worst game of charades. I then told my grandfather, “I...yo...yo te quiero tanto!” and “I...yo... te...extraño!” I heard the symphony beneath my veins, creating a sound that pounded against the thick wall of my chest. Boom Badah, Boom Badah, Boom Badah, Boom. “Enough!” I said.

I walked away from the phone, slamming the door behind me as I exited the room. It was March 7th, 2020, and the world would forever change from the pandemic. I never said goodbye to Nono. The picture of him lying in the darkness of his room as his phone stands untouched forever haunts me. It was the last night he slept alone.