The Phone They Cut Off

The Man Named Brent

Pam let me use her computer while the coffee finished, and what I learned in twenty minutes at that desk was this: when someone takes your telephone and your internet in the same week, they take every door you would use to find out why.

I could not look up the phone company. I could not look up my bank. I could not get into my email, because my email wanted to text a code to my phone, and my phone was a black rectangle that couldn’t receive a text from heaven.

That is how it works now. You do not have a key anymore. You have a phone that holds the keys, and if somebody lifts the phone, you are standing outside your own house.

It is a little store in the strip with the tanning salon and the tax preparer, and the young man behind the counter had a name tag that said Brent and a face about as old as my youngest grandchild’s. When I explained my situation he typed for a long time. Then he stopped typing and looked at his screen with his lips pressed together, the way a young person does when there is bad news and no instructions.

“Mrs. Aldrich,” he said. “This account is in a Walter J. Aldrich’s name.”

“My husband. He passed two years ago in August.”

“I’m very sorry. The account was never transferred to you. Your son is the account manager, and yesterday morning he moved your line onto a managed plan with a list of approved numbers. He has the passcode.”

“And I can undo it.”

“You’d need the account holder to authorize it. Or the manager.” He swallowed. “I can’t change it without the passcode. I’m really sorry.”

I was a school secretary for thirty-one years, and when I am angry I do not shout. I get organized.

“Brent,” I said, “is the telephone number mine?”

“Ma’am?”

“The ten digits. I have had that number since the week Walt brought home our first cell phone in a plastic bag. Is it mine, or Walt’s, or my son’s?”

He lowered his voice. “The number belongs to whoever uses it, ma’am. It’s yours in every way except on paper. But to move it I’d need the passcode, or you’d go through a process, and that takes weeks.”

Weeks.

I thanked him. I told him he was a kind young man and that his mother had raised him well, and he went pink to the ears.

Then I drove forty minutes to Fleet Farm in Chippewa Falls, because it is the only store in three counties where a woman can buy a loaf of bread, a chicken coop, and a telephone before ten in the morning.

The girl at the electronics counter sold me a plain phone for fifteen dollars and a card with thirty days of service for twenty-five more.

At eleven o’clock on a Tuesday, in the parking lot of Fleet Farm, I sat in my Buick with my spiral address book on the steering wheel and turned to the back, where I keep the Prayer Chain.

Forty-three names. Forty-three numbers. Every one in my own handwriting, in four colors of ink, because numbers change and I have never once trusted a number I did not write myself.

It turned out I had never needed my phone to know who I was.

I had it all in my purse.