Eleven Widows on Mom’s Porch

I put the phone in the drawer myself and told her it was fine. I told her the wall phone would always be there. I believed it.

“I’ll fix this,” I said to her now. “Sit down. I’m going to make you some eggs.”

“I’ve had my breakfast.”

“Then I’m going to have mine, and you’re going to watch me do it.”

She sat. I called Opal first. My hands were shaking worse than Mom’s.

“She’s alive, Opal. She’s right here. She’s fine. She’s drying a cup.”

There was a long silence, and then I heard something I will never forget, the sound of an old woman putting her hand over her mouth and crying with relief.

“Oh, thank the Lord,” Opal said. “Oh, Marcy. We didn’t know what to do. We’ve been taking turns calling. Fern wanted to call the sheriff, and I said no, he’ll think we’re silly.”

“You weren’t silly.”

“Tell her we love her. Tell her we’re sorry. We should have driven out. Four of us can’t drive anymore, honey, and the rest of us only go to church and the Dillons.”

“Nobody was ever on the list to go knock for her, Marcy. She was the one who sent us. We kept saying it was the weather and the phone company, and then it was nine days.”

I told Mom. She held out her hand for the receiver, which I did not have, because I was on my cell.

So I handed her the cell, and she held it to her ear with both hands the way you hold a hot cup, and she said, “Opal? Is that you, honey? It’s Jeanette. I’m fine.”

I turned away again.

Here is what the phone was for. I should have known, and in a way I did, but I had never put it into words until that morning.

Six years ago, in February, a woman named Alma Reinhardt fell on her kitchen floor and could not get up. Alma was a widow, living alone out past Lehigh, and nobody noticed until her daughter called from Denver at noon the next day.

She lay there for twenty-seven hours. She lived, and she can tell you what the linoleum felt like. She is eighty-eight now.

Mom heard about it at church that Sunday. She came home and sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and a sheet of paper, and she wrote down every widow she knew who lived alone. Eleven names.

She taped the list inside the cupboard door above the coffeepot. She started calling at seven the next morning.

Here is how it worked. One ring and she’d let it go, then she’d say “Up?” and whoever it was would say “Up.” That was the whole call. Ten seconds. Then she’d call the next name down.

If a woman did not pick up, Mom let it ring twice and tried again. If there was still nothing, she called the next widow on the list who lived closest and said, “Would you run over and knock?”

In six years, there were three mornings when someone did not answer. Two were a dead battery and a trip to the lake. The third was Hazel, who had the flu and was too proud to say. A neighbor found her with a fever of a hundred and three and drove her to Newton.