The one he had sworn he had lost, nearly a year before that final trip.

I remembered the losing of it so clearly.

He had been beside himself, in his contained way; he had turned the house upside down looking for it.

We had checked the car, the garage, the couch cushions, every drawer, under every bed.

For a careful man it had been a small torment, a thing that should not have been able to simply vanish, and in the end he had given up and bought a new one and grumbled about it for a month.

The lost phone had been a small running joke in the family, in the way that a careful man’s one disorganized failure becomes a joke.