The Thirty First Call From The Hospital

The thirty-first time, somebody picked up.

I was standing in the hallway outside the emergency room at the county hospital in Salina, between a vending machine and a wheelchair nobody had claimed, with my phone pressed so hard to my ear it hurt. I had quit expecting an answer around call fifteen. I was dialing by then the way you keep pushing an elevator button.

So when the ringing stopped and I heard breathing, I started talking before I had any air to do it with.

“Keith. Keith, thank God. It’s your mom. You need to get in the truck right now. They don’t think she’s going to make it to morning.”

“This isn’t Keith.”

A woman. Younger than me, by the sound of her. Not flustered. There was music behind her, something with a steel guitar, and a sliding door running on a track.

I looked at the screen to make sure I had the right number. I did. His picture was right there, the one from the lake, squinting in his Wildcats cap.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to reach Keith. This is his phone.”

“I know whose phone it is.” She let out a breath, the kind you let out at a child. “He’s in the shower. You’ve called about thirty times.”

“Thirty-one.”

“Okay. Well, it keeps lighting up, and it’s on the nightstand, and I can’t relax. We’re in Maui. It’s dinner time here. Whatever this is, it can wait until he’s home.”

I heard myself say, very politely, “His mother is dying.”

There was a pause. Not a long one.

“Honey, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t want to. Stop calling.”

And then the steel guitar was gone, and I was listening to the vending machine hum.

I want to tell you what I did next, because I have thought about it every day since, and I have decided I am not ashamed of any of it.

I did not call back.

I did not throw the phone. I did not slide down the wall. I stood there long enough to notice that my left shoe was untied and had been since Ash Street, and I bent down and tied it. Then I put the phone in my coat pocket, zipped the pocket, and walked back through the double doors to bed nine, where my mother-in-law was lying under a thin white blanket with her mouth a little open.

I pulled the chair up close.

I took her hand, which was cool and dry and light as a dinner roll.

“I’m here, Evelyn,” I said. “It’s Tracey. I’m right here.”

That is where I stayed.

Let me back up, but only as far as that afternoon.

My name is Tracey. I was forty-four that October. I had been married to Keith for nineteen years, and for eleven of those years, ever since his dad passed, I had been the one who looked after his mother.

Nobody assigned it to me. It just settled on me the way those things do. Keith sold irrigation equipment for a dealer out on the west edge of town, and he was on the road a lot, or said he was. Evelyn lived alone in the little white house on Ash Street where Keith grew up, four blocks from the grain elevators, with a pecan tree out front that dropped more than anybody could pick up.

I worked the front desk at a dentist’s office until three. Most days I was at Evelyn’s by three-twenty.