The Phone They Cut Off

“This is Greg Aldrich.”

“It’s your mother,” I said. “I’m calling from the library.”

There was a silence on the line. Not surprise. This was the other kind, the kind that arrives with the sound of a chair rolling back.

“Mom,” he said. “Okay. Hang on, let me take this somewhere.”

“Mom, I was going to talk to you about this on Sunday.”

“About what, Gregory?”

“About the phone.”

I would like to say I was calm. I looked calm the way a pond looks calm over a stump.

“My phone doesn’t work,” I said.

“I know it doesn’t. I did that.” He said it fast, like a man pulling a splinter. “I took you off the old plan yesterday morning and closed the internet account at the house. It’s not a punishment, Mom. It’s temporary, until we can sit down. I’ve got a flip phone coming Thursday with six numbers in it, me and Sheila and Dr. Prakash and the pharmacy and the church. Nobody can get at you on it.”

“Nobody can get at me.”

“The scammers, Mom.”

“Who is scamming me?” I asked.

“I don’t want to do this on a work phone.” His voice cracked a little at the top. “Please. Come Sunday. We’ll drive up and show you everything. I just need you to trust me for five days.”

Trust me.

That from the boy who once told me the dog ate his report card.

“Did you ask me?” I said.

“Mom.”

“Gregory. Did you ask me, before you did it.”

And my son, who is forty-six years old and builds the computer security for an insurance company with eight hundred employees, said in a very small voice, “No.”

“Then we’ll talk Sunday,” I said, and I hung up the phone on him very gently, so he would hear it settle.

I stood there with my hand on the beige receiver and I did not cry, because there was a woman waiting at the copier and Pam had put the coffee on.

I called Sheila next, at the hospital billing office in Eau Claire, and that call took four minutes and was worse.

Sheila is my soft one. She is forty-three, with two teenagers, and she cannot hold a secret in her face. I could hear her chin wobble over the line.

“Mom, it wasn’t supposed to go like this,” she said. “I said maybe we should ask you first, and Greg said you’d just tell us you were fine.”

“And would I have been wrong?”

“Mom.”

“Sheila, honey, I’m going to ask you one thing and I’d like you to think before you answer. When you said maybe you should ask me first, why did you stop?”

She did not answer. I could hear her breathing in a tight little pattern, the way she did at eight years old, when she had broken something and was deciding whether to say so.

“Because I was scared you’d be mad,” she said finally.

“Are you scared I’ll be mad on Sunday?”

“A little.”

“Good,” I said. “Be a little scared. Come anyway. And bring your brother.”

I gave her no more than that.