Eleven Widows on Mom’s Porch

“Call Opal.”

Her finger went to the buttons. It trembled, as it does, but the buttons were big and plastic and they pushed down with a click, and she did not miss one. Seven digits.

It rang once. Opal must have been sitting right by it.

“Opal? It’s Jeanette. I’m up.” She was quiet, listening, and I saw her chin tremble. “I know. I know. No, I’m fine. Craig did a silly thing, that’s all. Oh, don’t cry. I’m up. I’m right here.”

And then she said something that made me put my hand on the counter.

“You were all so worried. Imagine that. Somebody was worried about me.”

I want to tell you that I had never thought of it that way. I had not. Mom was the one who worried. She was the one who called. In her whole life she had never expected the phone to ring in the other direction.

She called Fern next, then Mindy and Kathleen and Hazel. By five o’clock she had talked to all eleven of them, ten seconds at a time, and then twenty minutes at a time, because it turns out that nobody can say “Up” and hang up after nine days.

I made supper. Royce, our neighbor, drove over from his farm after chores, still smelling of diesel, and he went out to the side of the house with a flashlight and checked the box Kyle had fixed.

“Looks solid,” he said when he came back. “But you know what I’d do, Marcy? I’d put a surge protector on that jack. Lightning comes through that line, you lose the phone and the television and the well pump.”

“You do that,” I said. “I can’t believe I’m the one who didn’t think of it.”

“You thought of the important part,” Royce said. He is a man of about nine words a day, and he used five of them on that.

I stayed the night in my old room under Dad’s army blanket. At nine, I came down for water and found Mom in the dark kitchen, sitting in her chair with the phone on her lap.

“It rang again,” she said. “Gladys. She wanted to say good night. Gladys hasn’t said good night to anyone in eleven years.”

I kissed the top of her head. She smelled like Jergens lotion and cedar. “Go to bed, Mom.”

“In a minute,” she said. “I want to hear it hum.”

At 6:58 the next morning, the phone rang before she could dial it.

Mom looked at me over her coffee. I had never seen anything like the look on her face. She picked up the receiver, and Opal’s voice came out of it so loudly I could hear it across the kitchen.

“Jeanette! Are you up?”

“Up,” Mom said, and she laughed, a real laugh, high and surprised. “Opal, I’m the one who’s supposed to ask!”

“I know it,” Opal said. “We decided to switch for one morning. We have a surprise for you. We’ll be there by ten. Don’t leave the house.”

“Where would I go?” Mom said. “I haven’t got a car.”

She hung up and turned to me. “Marcy, what’s all this?”

“I think you should go put on a nicer cardigan,” I said.