The Phone They Cut Off

The screen on my phone stayed black on Tuesday morning, because my son and daughter had shut off the number I carried for twenty-eight years and my internet along with it, so by nine o’clock I owned a fifteen dollar phone from Fleet Farm and was knocking on doors.

I did not know any of that when I woke up.

I knew it was 6:40, because the clock radio on Walt’s side of the bed says so in red numbers. I knew the frost was down on the yard, because the light through the curtain had that gray-blue look it gets the second week of October.

I reached for my phone on the nightstand the way I have reached for it every morning since 1998.

The screen was dark. I pressed the side button and it lit up, and across the top, where the little bars belong, there was a row of gray words that said No Service.

I turned it off and on again. I am seventy-two, not dead, and I know what you do first.

No Service.

I put on my robe and went down the hall to the kitchen, where the router sits on top of the refrigerator beside the cookie tin. For three years it has blinked green at me every morning like a small, faithful animal.

It was blinking amber.

It had been a quiet Monday, I will say that. I had spent the afternoon at Trinity Lutheran with the quilting circle, tying off a baby quilt for the Hendricks girl, and my phone had stayed in my coat in the cloakroom. When I got it out that evening there were no messages and no missed calls, and I remember thinking, well, isn’t that nice, for once nobody needs me.

That is the sentence I think about most now.

Nobody needs me.

I made my coffee and stood at the sink looking at the bird feeder, and a cold finger went down my back. Because there is one person in Ostrander, Wisconsin, who needs me every single morning at seven o’clock sharp, and it was already ten of.

His name is Delbert Kowalski. He is eighty-four years old and he has a defibrillator in his chest the size of a pocket watch, and he lives alone on Pine Street in the house where he and Margaret raised five children.

Nine years ago, a week after Margaret’s funeral, I started calling him at seven every morning. Just to say good morning. Just to hear him say it back.

That was the whole arrangement. If he does not pick up by the fifth ring, I put on my coat and go over there, and in nine years I have done that four times. Twice he was in the shower. Once he had the television up too loud. Once he was on the bathroom floor with a bruise coming up on his hip like a thunderhead, and the ambulance got there in eleven minutes because I did not wait to find out whether it was nothing.

I put my good wool coat on over my robe, which I am not proud of, and drove three blocks in the gray light with my hands tight on the wheel.

Delbert was on his front porch.

He was in his flannel robe and his boots, no socks, holding his phone out in front of him like a man holding a dead fish. He saw my Buick turn the corner and he did not wave. He just let out a breath I could see from the street.