Eleven Widows on Mom’s Porch

“Thursday.” She frowned. “I lose track of the days. Nobody calls to tell me.”

I pulled her in and held her so hard that she patted my back and said, “Well, goodness, you’ll wrinkle me.”

Then I let go, and I looked past her into the kitchen, which opens right off the front door, and I saw the phone.

It is a beige wall phone, the kind with a long curly cord, hung on the kitchen wall beside the calendar from the feed store. It has been there since 1986. Dad hung it himself, crooked, and Mom never let anybody fix it.

The receiver was not in its cradle. It was lying on the counter with the cord stretched, the way you would leave something you had just checked.

“Mom, how long has that been off the hook?”

“Oh, I only pick it up to listen,” she said. “Every morning at seven. I thought, maybe the line is fixed overnight. Maybe it’s just a little thing.”

She said it so simply that I had to turn toward the window.

Nine mornings. She had stood in her kitchen at seven o’clock, a woman of seventy-nine, and lifted a telephone to her ear and listened to nothing.

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?” I asked, and my voice came out harder than I meant.

“Who would I tell?” She smiled at me, a little embarrassed. “Craig said I have the cell. I figured it was my doing. I figured I’d done something to it.”

“Where’s the cell phone, Mom?”

She pointed. I opened the drawer by the stove. It sat under the rubber bands and the twist ties and a roll of masking tape, black glass, completely dead.

I should explain about the cell phone, because I know what you are thinking. I thought it myself, standing there with the dead thing in my hand.

You are thinking: why didn’t Marcy just teach her to use it? Why didn’t somebody just show her?

I tried. I want that on the record. Craig bought a cell phone plan the winter after Dad died, and he set up an old smartphone for Mom and gave it to her at Christmas, and I sat with her at this same table on three Sundays in a row.

The trouble is not that my mother is slow. She ran a farm office, a household and a church kitchen for fifty-four years. The trouble is her hands.

Mom has had a tremor since her sixties. Her hands shake, not hard, but steadily, like a leaf in a window. On her old phone with the big plastic buttons, it did not matter. She could press a button down.

On glass, it matters. The screen reads a trembling fingertip as ten taps in ten places. She could not hit the green circle to answer. She hung up on me twice. Once she called a man in Topeka and was too polite to hang up for four minutes.

I bought her a bigger phone, then a stylus, then a case with a handle. By the third Sunday she was crying in the quiet way she does, and she said, “I’m sorry, honey, I’m just too old for this.”