Morse code transmits through skin as if my hand lives on its own, the sinister one clutching the steering wheel, tingling like a silenced, set-to-vibrate phone, my father’s memory on the line—The way his hand shook when reaching for things. Like my grandmother's did, though I remember more her quaking voice,  telling me how I never call. I could hardly talk back then. She’d holler her heart at anyone from across the hall. I stored mine in a mason jar—all that unspent coin, wishes not flung, water left still. Wishes hidden instead in the root cellar, where need overwinters. My mother’s childhood home had a root cellar, in the basement next to her father’s workshop. When snow was deep outside, she and her sister would ride their tricycle around the sheet-strung laundry room, passing ghosts, lapping the furnace and the windowless nook, shelved with fruits and vegetables their mother canned. A place to hide, steal peeks of their father in his tinkering, scramble like mice, giggling after being caught by the echo of his gentle, teasing voice. In the root cellar of my body, a little girl is spying on my hand, watching what it grips and what it releases. How it sometimes shakes, asks for softness. When my father was a child, his house would shake each time hot molten metal at the steel mill across the street hit the cold containers, the explosion setting off tremors that added to the squeal and crash of railroad cars coupling. I wonder if the sounds eventually faded into the background, the house adapting to the stress. Whether his family’s notice disappeared as quickly as the years. Or if my father soaked in the clamor of Elizabeth and 14th Street so long he absorbed it, like the walls that retained the heavy scent of his mother’s sarma, meat cradled in cabbage leaves, boiled till tender. The way his next half century in Florida curled around and held his cupped memory of Granite City, Illinois. Until. And what did he pass on to me, the last time I held his palm’s softened pad, his body too tired to quake? I know trembling isn't always a sign of pathology, ghost-twitch of disease, subcutaneous stress, compressed nerve, prickling regret sprung electric from the psyche, running through the house of the body. Maybe in mine it’s a message of generations, a dispatch from someone missed—Are you there? I'm trying to reach you—telegraphing itself from far away. I pull over, stop the car, lift my hand to answer.