The Phone They Cut Off

“Item one is true,” I added, because I will not be made into a saint. “I clicked a refund email in March and I lost two hundred twelve dollars. I knew in ten minutes. I called the bank myself, and they reversed it. And I did not tell you, because I knew exactly what would happen. I was right about that, wasn’t I?”

Sheila made a sound like a hiccup.

“Item three,” I said, and turned toward the coat tree. “Jordan?”

He came off the wall as if he’d been called to the principal. He had a canvas bag he’d been holding behind his leg all afternoon, and he put it on my dining table and took out a steel plant hanger, black and gleaming, with a tulip welded at the top and every join as smooth as a dime.

“I made it in the shop,” he said to the tablecloth. “It’s my best bead. It’s for her kitchen window.”

Then he looked at my son.

“The fifty dollars a week is my gas to get to Wausau. Mrs. Aldrich does it because my grandma used to give me gas money and then she died. The eighteen hundred was my second semester. I have a job lined up in Eau Claire in the spring, at the foundry. She said not to tell anybody because it was nobody’s business.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I didn’t want you to think she was a, that she was being, I wanted to say thank you to her but she said just work hard.”

Nobody said anything.

Then my fifteen dollar phone buzzed on the table next to the ham.

I looked at the number. “That will be Joyce, in Amarillo. I told her I’d call at four, so either something has happened or Dewey is asking. May I put her on the speaker?”

“Who’s Joyce?” Greg said.

I pressed the button.

“Vivian?” said a tired woman’s voice, with Texas wrapped all through it. “Vivian, I’m sorry to break in on your company.”

“Joyce, I have my son and my daughter here,” I said. “You’re on speaker. Say what you like.”

“Oh. Oh, Greg. Sheila.” Her breath caught. “Honey, your father and my Dewey were in the same barracks in nineteen seventy-four. Dewey has had Lou Gehrig’s disease two years. He can’t leave the bed, and by evening he can’t talk, and the only thing that wakes him up is a Walt story. Your mother reads him your father’s old letters on Sunday afternoons. Two hours. Three. Whatever he’s got.”

I heard the room go still behind her voice.

“He’s been asking all week whether Vivian was coming,” Joyce said. “Today he woke up and wouldn’t wait.” She stopped, and I heard another sound under hers, a rasp like paper. “He wants to say something. Hold on.”

There was a long, hard breath on the line.

“Tell the boy,” said a voice I’d heard every Sunday for two months, thin as a thread. “His father never caught a fish that big.”

My son put both hands over his face.

I told Joyce I’d call at four, and the room let go of its breath.

That is when Sheila started to cry, the real way, with her shoulders.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Mom, I’m so sorry. I lie awake. I lie there every night picturing you on the kitchen floor and your phone ringing in another room and nobody coming. I just wanted to make it safe.”

I took her hand across the corner of the table.