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

The hospital in Alpine kept him for eleven days.

Rosa drove three hours from El Paso the first morning. She stood in the doorway of his room for a long time before she went in. I waited in the hall. I didn’t want to be there for what she said to him. Some things don’t belong on the radio.

When she came out an hour later, her eyes were red and her mascara was everywhere.

“He named his horse after me,” she said. “Did you know that? The sorrel. Her name is Rosita.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Thirty-two years,” she said. “He’s been sober for twenty of them. He wrote me letters every Christmas. He never mailed them. He has a shoebox full of them in that trailer.”

She sat down next to me on the plastic chair in the hallway.

“He doesn’t have health insurance,” she said. “He’s seventy-four. He never signed up for Medicare, because you need an address and he didn’t want anybody to find him. The hospital social worker is helping. I have a lawyer friend who does elder law. We’ll figure it out.”

“What happens to him after?”

She looked at the door of his room.

“He comes home,” she said. “With me. To El Paso. Rosita, too. I have a yard.”

On the night he left the hospital, at 2:00 a.m., the phone at KMRF lit up.

It wasn’t a 432 number. It was a 915.

El Paso.

“KMRF, you’re on the air.”

“Santi.” Rosa’s voice. Then, behind her, softer, the gravel in the coffee can. “Can you play the song?”

“Who’s it for?”

There was a little pause. Some whispering.

Then the old man came on the line.

“For Rosa,” he said. “Both of them.”

I played it.

Then I played it again.

Out in the desert, somewhere on Highway 90, a trucker flashed his headlights at the station’s tower as he drove by.

They do that sometimes.

It means they’re listening.