Every Night at 2 a.m., the Same Caller Asked My Radio Station to Play the Same Song for “Rosa.” He Never Gave His Name. After 300 Nights, I Found Out Who Rosa Was

Her name was Rosa Elizondo.

She was fifty. She lived in El Paso. And she had never once heard my radio show, because KMRF’s signal doesn’t reach El Paso.

“The phone you called belongs to my father,” she said. “Or it did. I haven’t seen him in thirty-two years. The phone company called me tonight because the account was in my mother’s name before she died. They said there was a lot of activity. Every night. 2 a.m.”

“He calls my show,” I said. “Every night. For three hundred nights. He asks me to play ‘Volver, Volver’ for Rosa.”

She didn’t say anything. Then I heard her start to cry.

“That was my mother’s song,” she said. “He used to sing it to her in the kitchen. Before he left.”

Her father’s name was Ernesto Elizondo. He’d been a ranch hand, a horse breaker, a good singer and a bad drinker. When Rosa was eighteen, after a terrible fight with her mother, he walked out of their house in El Paso and never came back.

Her mother never heard from him again. She died nine years ago.

“I thought he was dead,” Rosa said. “I hated him for thirty-two years. And he’s been calling a radio station in the middle of the desert every night to play our song?”

“He called every night until tonight.”

“Where is he?”

I looked at the caller log.

The phone was a prepaid cell. No address.

But the station’s engineer, an old man named Hector who’d been keeping the transmitter alive since 1979, had told me once that the only places in our listening area with cell service at 2 a.m. were the town of Marfa, the town of Alpine, and one tower up in the Davis Mountains that covered a handful of remote ranches.

I hadn’t heard the sound of a town in the background of those calls.

I’d heard wind.

And sometimes, a horse.

“Rosa,” I said. “I think I know where to look.”