The Phone They Cut Off

“Viv,” he said, when I got up the walk. “Where in the Sam Hill have you been.”

“It’s five of seven,” I said. “I’m early.”

“I called you eleven times since yesterday noon.”

I stopped on the second step.

“Eleven?”

“Twice last night, and then at six this morning, and then I got up at the crack of dawn and sat out here with it.” He held the phone toward me. “Listen to this.”

He pressed the button and put it on speaker, and into the cold October air came a woman’s recorded voice, pleasant and flat as a pie tin.

We’re sorry. The number you have dialed is not in service at this time. Please check the number and try again.

I have heard that message before, about other people. Never once about me.

Delbert pressed it again, as if it might change its mind.

We’re sorry. The number you have dialed is not in service.

“I was about to call Gus to come over and look in your windows,” he said. His voice was rough. “I figured you’d fallen. I figured you’d fallen and nobody knew, and I was sitting here with a telephone that couldn’t get to you.”

An eighty-four-year-old man with a heart machine had spent a night believing I might be on my kitchen floor.

I got him back into his kitchen. I made his toast myself, because his hand shakes in the morning and he is too proud to say so. I checked Tuesday’s slot on the pill organizer and watched him take the little white one and the big blue one.

“What happened to your phone?” he said.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m going to find out.”

I did not suspect the answer was sitting in two houses, one in Waukesha and one in Eau Claire.

The Library

The Ostrander Public Library opens at nine, but Pam Reinholt gets there at eight-thirty to empty the book drop, and she lets me in the side door because I ran the Friday story hour there for eleven years and she has never asked for the key back.

She took one look at me in my coat and said, “Vivian, are you hurt?”

“I need to use your telephone,” I said. “The desk one. And then your computer, if you’ll allow it.”

Pam has the kind of face that stays calm while the rest of her works, and I have always loved her for it. She slid the old beige desk phone across the counter without asking one question.

Here is the part that tells you how the world changed while I was busy.

I did not know my children’s phone numbers.

I knew them the way I know my own birthday. I knew them in my thumb, because I press a name and a voice comes out. But I could not have written Greg’s number on a piece of paper if you had paid me.

So I did what a woman of my age does. I reached into my purse and took out the little spiral address book that has lived there since the Reagan years, and I found Greg under G in my own handwriting, the old apartment number crossed out and the new one written over it in blue pen.

I dialed it with my index finger.

He picked up on the second ring, which tells you something. My son never answers a number he does not know.