Don't You Cry(16)

“Hello?” I ask, pressing the phone to my ear.

“Is this Esther Vaughan?” probes a voice on the other end of the line.

And then I utter the three words that in about thirteen seconds I’ll regret having said. “No, it’s not,” I say, wishing instantly that I would have said, This is she. But then again, why would I when my interest has yet to be piqued? It takes much more than a blocked phone number to get my attention. I get blocked calls all the time, mainly debt collectors calling to collect unpaid bills. Old credit cards with cringe-worthy balances I haven’t made payments to in years. Student loans.

“Is she there?” asks the voice. It’s a gruff voice, a male voice, that isn’t going to fool around with any pleasantries or wisecracks or banter.

“No,” I say, and then, “Can I take a message?” I ask as my hand fumbles through the near-darkness for the dry-erase board and a marker. I drift across the room to the board that hangs aslant from a wall, fully prepared to jot down a name and phone number below the arcane message: Ran out. Be home soon, a phrase that suddenly takes on an abundance of meaning.

Ran out. Be home soon.

Esther wrote that. I know she did. It’s not my handwriting; it’s hers. The fusion of cursive and print, upper-and lowercase words. Both feminine and masculine all at the same time.

But when did she leave the message, I wonder, and why?

Was it last week when she ran back to the bookshop to find her forgotten faux glasses? Or just a couple days ago when she hurried to the Edgewater branch of the Chicago Public Library on Broadway to return a book before closing time, so that it wouldn’t be late? Esther is a stickler for returning books on time.

Or, I wonder then while waiting for the guy on the other end of the cell phone to decide whether or not he’s going to leave a message, did she leave the annotation last night before she opened her bedroom window and climbed on out? That’s it, then, I tell myself. There’s no reason to be worried. Esther left me a note; she’ll be home soon. It says so right there on the board.

Ran out. Be home soon.

And then to my dismay, the man on the other end of the line curtly replies, “It’s a confidential matter.” His voice is ticked off. “We had an appointment this afternoon. She didn’t show.”

Apparently that information—Esther’s sloppy, negligent behavior—isn’t quite as confidential as who he is or why he’s calling. There are voices in the background that I try hard to decrypt: cars, the lapping sound of ocean waves, a blender. I can’t be sure. It all fuses together until it is one thing and one thing alone: noise. Clamor. Racket. A whole hullabaloo.

“I can tell her you called,” I suggest, exploring for a name. A reason for calling.

“I’ll call back,” he says instead, and the line goes dead. I stand there in the kitchen, my bare feet cold on the black-and-white checkerboard tile, watching as, in my hand, the cell phone screen fades to black. I press the home button and swipe my finger across the screen. The phone prompts me for Esther’s password. Password? My heart starts to race. Damn!

I start pressing digits at random until I’m locked out of the phone altogether, the device disabled, and I’m stuck waiting an entire minute—sixty long, maddening seconds—until I can do it again. And again. And again.

I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, nor the brightest crayon in the box. I’ve been told as much before. So it shouldn’t surprise me in the least bit that I have no idea how to break into Esther’s phone without her password or thumbprint. And yet it does.

I placate myself with the simple fact that he promised to call back. The gruff voice on the other end of the line said that he would call back.

I’ll do better the next time, I tell myself. I will.





Alex

It’s evening at my house. I’m cooking. Pops is watching TV, feet on the old coffee table, a bottle of beer in his hand. He’s drunk, but he’s not wasted. He still knows his left hand from his right, which is a big accomplishment some days. He was awake when I got home from work this evening. Also a big accomplishment. Seems he managed a shower, too. He’d changed out of his striped shirt and no longer reeked of the god-awful cologne or the rank morning breath as he did when I left for work that morning. Now he just reeks of booze.

On the TV is a football game. The Detroit Lions. He screams at the TV.

There are chicken nuggets in the oven and a can of green beans warming on the stove. Pops wanders through the kitchen for another beer and asks if I’d like one, too. I look him in the blasted eyes and say, “I’m eighteen,” though I’m not sure that means too much to him. On the fridge door is a picture I drew about a dozen years ago of outer space: the sun, the moon, the stars, Neptune and Jupiter, in Crayola crayons. Worn along the edges, a corner missing, having fallen from its magnet about a million times. The colors are faded. Everything, these days, seems like it’s starting to fade.

Sharing the same magnet is a postcard from my mother. I threw it in the trash when it arrived in the mail, but Pops found it there, mixed up with lunch meat scraps and corn kernels, and pulled it back out again. This one’s from San Antonio. The Alamo, it says.

You shouldn’t be so hard on her, he’d said to me when he found the postcard in the trash. And then that line was trailed by the same one it always was when Pops talked about my mom. She did the best that she could do.