Not Perfect(49)

It was Tabitha’s turn to sigh big.

“Here’s my phone,” she said to Fern as nonchalantly as she could.

“No,” Fern said quickly. “I want to use the regular phone, the house phone.”

“Okay,” Tabitha said, surprised by her forcefulness. She leaned over and grabbed the phone out of its cradle, pressed the “talk” button and was relieved to hear the dial tone. That was a bill she hadn’t thought about in a while, and she hadn’t used this phone so she was glad to see it was still working. She handed it to Fern with the dial tone leaking out. Fern looked seriously at the phone, pushed the “off” button, and silenced the dial tone.

“Is our number blocked?” Fern asked.

“You mean does it show up on call waiting?”

“Yeah, can someone tell it’s our phone calling?”

“You mean Daddy? Will Daddy know? Yes, he’ll know. We had a blocked number for a while but we stopped paying for that service,” she said, then, “I think.”

“How can I be sure?”

Tabitha was getting a little annoyed. She wanted to say, Just call already, he isn’t going to answer anyway, but the longer she played along, the longer Fern thought she had the possibility of talking to Stuart. So . . .

“Here, call my cell phone, just dial it: 2-1-5, 5-5-5, 2-3-0-9. Push ‘one’ first.”

Fern hesitated, then she pressed the “talk” button again, then the “one,” then the first three numbers. She looked up expectantly.

“Five, five, five; two, three, zero, nine,” Tabitha said slowly. There was a pause, and Tabitha’s phone began to ring. She looked at the display: Blocked Call it said. Huh.

“So I guess we are still paying for that service,” Tabitha said. “You have to push ‘star-eight-two’ to unblock it.”

Fern looked around for a piece of paper and a pen, which she found off to the side, and she drew a star and wrote 8 2.

“Do you know Daddy’s number?” Tabitha asked.

“Yes, I do,” Fern said seriously.

They just sat there for a minute.

“Are you going to call?” Tabitha finally said gently. A little hope was okay, but she couldn’t stand it anymore, the buildup, the inevitable disappointment.

“I’m going to call from my room,” Fern said.

“Why?”

“I just want to,” she said. “I’m nine and I can have some privacy. Levi has privacy.”

Levi. Shoot. He should be home by now. Okay, okay, she’d let Fern call, there’d be no answer, and then she’d think about Levi.

“Fine,” Tabitha said as casually as she could.

Fern hopped down from the high stool, and Tabitha noticed that she put most of her weight on her left leg. Once she steadied herself, she padded through the kitchen and turned left, out of Tabitha’s sight. Tabitha counted to twenty before walking as quietly as she could toward the kitchen door. She got there just in time to see Fern go into her room and push her door shut. Tabitha waited another twenty seconds. She found herself calculating how long it would take for Fern to realize he wasn’t going to answer, and then how long after that it would take for Fern to get over it. Would it be a matter of minutes? Would it ruin their whole night?

Tabitha crept down the hallway and stood just outside Fern’s closed door. She wished she had a glass or something that she could put to the wood to try to conduct sound. Did that even work? She waited. There was no sound at all coming from Fern’s room, and she wondered if it was all a farce, if Fern never meant to call but just wanted to evoke Stuart somehow, to let Tabitha know she was thinking about him.

“Daddy?”

Tabitha almost fell against the door.

“Daddy!” She said it like he just emerged from the dead, which he basically did. Tabitha had her hand on the doorknob, she was about to force her way in. But something made her take it back. Her heart was beating so hard, she was surprised Fern couldn’t sense it through the door.

“I know, I tried, I really tried,” Fern said. She was crying now. Could she be pretending? Had she gone crazy and was imagining talking to Stuart the way a traumatized kid created imaginary friends? There was a long pause.

“Okay. Do you promise?”

More silence.

“I just wanted to ask you about this one . . . oh, okay . . . okay . . . I love you, too.”

Tabitha had her hand on the doorknob again. She grasped it and was ready to push it open when Fern talked again.

“But when are you coming home?”

With that, Tabitha was in the room. She was by Fern’s side grabbing for the phone. The look on Fern’s face was pure terror. Fern held firmly to the phone, took it away from her ear, and without another word pressed the “off” button to end the call. All the while Tabitha pulled at it, fighting her for it. They fell onto their sides on Fern’s wall-to-wall bright-yellow carpet.

“Ow!” Fern yelled—howled, really. Tabitha had just gotten the phone away and had it to her ear, frantically pushing the “talk” button.

“Hello? Stuart? Hello?” she screamed into the phone.

“You’re on my knee!” Fern screamed.

Tabitha moved over, but would not give up on the phone. She went to recent calls and dialed back the number. It was Stuart’s cell, the one she had called over and over again with no answer. No voicemail. It rang and rang.