The Thirty First Call From The Hospital

I did not overwork them. I want that written down somewhere.

My phone rang at eleven-fifteen. His picture. The cap, the lake.

I let it ring three times so my voice would be level.

“Hey, Trace.” Bright. A little out of breath. “Babe, I am so sorry. I just saw all these. My phone died yesterday and I left the charger in the truck, and then we had this dinner thing that went late. What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

I stood at Evelyn’s sink and looked at the pecan tree.

“Your mother died at five forty-two this morning.”

Silence. Then, “What?”

“She collapsed in the kitchen yesterday afternoon. I found her. Her heart gave out. She passed at the county hospital. Pastor Dan and I were with her.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Trace. Why didn’t you…” He stopped. He heard what he was about to ask.

“I called,” I said.

“I know. I know you did. I’m looking at them. Thirty…”

“Thirty-one.”

I waited for him to wonder about the thirty-first. I could hear him doing it. I could hear him looking at his call log and seeing that one of those calls had not gone to voicemail, that one of them had lasted fifty-some seconds, and trying to work out what that meant and what I knew.

I didn’t help him.

“Visitation is Saturday at six at the funeral home on Iron Avenue,” I said. “The service is Monday at ten at Grace. I’ve picked the blue dress with the pearl buttons. If you’d rather a different one, tell me today.”

“No. No, the blue. Trace, I’ll get the first flight. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

“It’s a six-hour drive from Denver, Keith. You could be here for supper.”

The line was so quiet I could hear the ocean in it.

“The truck’s acting up,” he said finally. “I may have to fly.”

“Then fly.”

“Tracey. Honey. Are you okay? You sound…”

“I have pies in the oven,” I said, and I hung up.

The bake sale was Saturday morning, and I worked it. People told me I didn’t have to. I said Evelyn would come up out of the ground if that table was short four pies.

I wore both aprons. Nobody asked why. A good many people cried when they saw them.

And everybody asked the same question, kindly, with a hand on my arm.

“Where’s Keith, honey?”

“Traveling,” I said. “He’s on his way.”

By Saturday night he was not there.

The visitation started at six. The line was out the door of the funeral home by a quarter past, down the steps and along the sidewalk, farmers with their caps in their hands and church ladies holding foil pans, because Evelyn had taught half that town in Sunday school and fed the other half.

I stood by the casket alone. An hour of it. Shaking hands, getting hugged, saying thank you, saying she went easy, saying yes, doesn’t she look nice, saying he’s traveling, he’s on his way.

At seven-fifteen the line turned its head, all at once, the way wheat does.

Keith came through the door in the gray suit I had laid out for a conference in Denver.

He was sunburned.

I don’t mean he had a little color. I mean his nose was peeling. His forehead was the red of a boiled ham, with a white stripe across the top where sunglasses had sat up in his hair, and his neck was dark brown down to a sharp line at his collar. In Salina, Kansas, in the second week of October, with frost on the pumpkins.