The Voiceover Artist. Dave Reidy

      I KEPT OFFERING Simon music and sign-language lessons from any teacher who would let me sit outside an open door and listen, taking care not to suggest that Simon wasn’t good enough as he was, only that he might like to make music or communicate. But Simon wouldn’t take the lessons. I think they frightened him, actually, as if learning an instrument or sign language would guarantee he’d never, ever speak again. Whatever the reason, even after six years without speaking, Simon wouldn’t give up listening to the radio for a chance to make music or sign language.

      When he was thirteen years old and in eighth grade, I pulled Simon away from his radio to see Connor perform as part of the choir in the junior high’s Happy Holidays Concert. Frank was still in front of the television in his undershirt fifteen minutes before the performance was to begin, so I left without him. He arrived late and spent the concert frowning and fidgeting uncomfortably in the folding chair I had saved for him. Simon endured the singing with his arms folded and his head down. He might have feared that I’d take his paying attention as some hint he finally wanted music lessons. But during “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Simon looked up to watch Connor get the night’s only laughs by singing “five golden rings” eight different ways, each hammier than the one before.

      After the concert, Connor rode home with Frank in his truck. Simon went with me. Whenever it was just the two of us in the car, Simon would sit in the front passenger seat and take control of the stereo, which must have had more powerful reception than his clock radio did, because Simon would bypass perfectly audible commercials to scan the AM dial for ads broadcast from far-off places. We were about a mile from home the night of the concert when a voice, calling out through a storm of static, told me to “come on down” to a restaurant in downtown Omaha for “eastern Nebraska’s finest steaks” and one-dollar draft beers. Even in the December darkness on an unlit two-lane highway, I could see the open-mouthed amazement on Simon’s face. At the beginning of a long day, I might have reminded myself that Simon didn’t feel, as I did, that the radio voices were taunting him in his silence, and I might have wondered aloud at the modern miracle of invisible waves carrying speech across the prairie to our ears. But at the end of a long day, after twenty minutes of irritating electronic hisses and squeals had paid off only in a commercial for a restaurant four-hundred miles away, I said, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Simon. You’ve found a way to make radio even more boring.”

      Two days later, on Saturday, I was at the kitchen table reading the Peoria Journal Star when I came across a profile of Larry Sellers, a voiceover artist who was born and raised in Sampere, Illinois, not far from Leyton. According to the paper, Sellers had done national television commercials for Maalox, Hertz, and Wendy’s, and for the past ten years, he’d been the radio voice of Jewel Food Stores. In the words of his long-time agent, Larry Sellers was “one of the very few voiceover artists who can take a mediocre script and make a great radio commercial without changing a word.”

      I read the entire profile, hoping to find the reason why my silent son listened to nothing but commercials. When I reached the end of the piece, though, I’d learned more than I wanted to know about Larry Sellers and nothing about Simon. Even so, I thought that Simon might find the article interesting. I hesitated to hand my silenced son a story about a man who had grown up nearby and made it on the radio, but I decided there was no more harm in Simon reading a profile of Larry Sellers than there was in a wheelchair-bound boy reading the sports page. So I folded the Lifestyle section into quarters, putting the Sellers profile in front, and walked to Simon’s room.

      He was lying on his bed with his clock radio, tuned to a commercial for a Monster Truck rally, in his lap.

      I held up the newspaper and pointed to Sellers’ photo. “This man is on the radio.”

      As I handed it over, I made the profile, in my own mind, a kind of peace offering, a sign that I would let Simon enjoy his simplest pleasure without any more criticism from me.

      Later that same day, when I stepped into his room, Simon shut me up with a wave before I could say anything.

      “Hey!” I said, sharply.

      Then Simon gestured toward the radio in his lap and, more politely but just as urgently—with his eyes, this time—insisted I be silent.

      I listened, indignant at the idea that anything short of an emergency Presidential address could justify Simon’s shushing me this way. What I heard was a man telling me about a sale on bananas and a two-for-one deal on cans of Campbell’s Soup. It was a commercial for Jewel Food Stores. The voice belonged to Larry Sellers.

      I stayed silent until the commercial was over. Then I said, “Dinner’s ready.”

      Simon nodded, turned off his radio, and rolled off the bed onto his feet. As he passed me in the doorway, he put his arm around my back and leaned his head against my arm, a kind of half hug that offered more affection than I’d gotten from Simon since he entered junior high.

      As he walked away, I smiled at the possibility that, by introducing Simon to Larry Sellers, I’d done what few mothers who’d so poorly chosen a husband ever did: given my son a hero.

      I began to listen to Larry Sellers’ voice as closely as Simon did. I asked him questions about the voiceover artist’s style and technique, and Simon answered them as best he could with headshakes and nods. But my questions weren’t about Larry Sellers, really. They were about Simon. I came to treat the voice of Larry Sellers as a kind of surrogate for my son’s, as if the much older man’s speech—not what he said, but how he said it—could give me some idea of how Simon might sound if he could talk. The only voice I remembered as Simon’s was that of a little boy. And as Simon grew into a young man with acne on his shoulders and hair sprouting out of his Adam’s apple, my memory of that little voice faded until, when I lay awake in bed at night, with Frank snoring a few inches and a million miles away from me, I was no longer certain that the voice I heard so faintly in my mind’s ear had ever belonged to Simon.