The Nine Thousand Dollar Phone Call

The Paper by the Phone

Nolan Frisk drove back to Aurora on Sunday with a card from the state investigator on his dashboard and a statement signed in three places. I do not know what the district attorney decided, and I will not pretend to. It is not my place to say how the story of a frightened twenty-three-year-old ends.

On the Monday after, he drove to town with a sheet of paper folded in his shirt pocket. He stood at my window at nine in the morning with his cap in his hand, and he did not shake.

“Tessa,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. A man ought to be good for something, and I’ve been retired a long time.”

He asked Corliss if he might sit in the bank lobby on Thursday mornings with a cup of coffee, in the leather chair by the window. He did not want a job or a badge. He wanted to be there.

“Emil,” she said, “I’ll have Imelda bring the roll.”

So that is what he does. On Thursday mornings, from nine until noon, an eighty-two-year-old man in a canvas coat sits in the lobby of Elliston State Bank and visits with whoever comes in.

And when some old man walks in a little bent and a little pale, holding a folded slip of paper in his palm, my grandfather rises from the leather chair and says, in a voice nobody has ever heard fail, “Pull up a chair, friend. Have you eaten yet?”

Four times since October a man has pulled up a chair. Four times the paper in his hand turned out to be somebody’s savings and the voice on the phone turned out to be a stranger. Every one has walked out with his money and his dignity.

I do not know a better kind of justice. I have looked.

The folded paper he carried that Monday was a note. He had written it himself on the back of a feed store receipt in his square carpenter’s pencil, and he taped it to the wall beside the kitchen telephone, right where the cord loops down.

I saw it the next time I visited. It has gone a little yellow at the edges.

It says: Hang up. Call Tessa. Then you can call yourself anything you like.

Underneath it, in a different hand, a young man’s ballpoint, someone has added one more line. And call me. I always pick up. Jonah.

I stood in my grandfather’s kitchen and read it twice. Outside the wind was combing the milo stubble, and the cottonwoods my grandmother planted were bare and gold at the tips. From somewhere far down County Road 18 I heard a truck coming, slow, to see if anything needed doing.

Nothing did. It was Thursday, and everyone was where they were supposed to be.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.