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.
If you say so, was what I’d said before leaving the room. I wonder if it’s possible to hate someone and feel sorry for them at the same time? I felt sorry for her, sure. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother.
But I also hate her, too.
Pops is a lousy drunk, and the more he drinks, the more he thinks about my mother. About the way she left us all those years ago, without ever saying goodbye. About the fact that he still has their wedding photo framed and hung on the bedroom wall, about the fact that he still wears his wedding band, though she’s been gone a whole thirteen years. Since I was five. A little boy with Legos and Star Wars toys. That’s when she left.
If it was up to me I would have chucked that ring long ago. Not that I hold a grudge or anything, because I don’t. I just think I would have tossed the ring. Or pawned it like he pawned my high school class ring for booze. Instead, it becomes a hot topic of conversation in the many botched dates Pops has with the single ladies around town—a reservoir that is drying up quickly and will soon be completely sapped. Chances are he’s dated them all. Except for Ingrid, maybe, the agoraphobic, for reasons I don’t need to explain. Pops spends his dates at the tavern in town, getting loaded and talking about how my mother left him and me when I was five years old. It’s supposed to be a sympathy trigger, but instead he ends up looking like a patsy. Pops ends up crying and scaring the ladies away one by one, like old cans lined in a row for target practice.
He has no clue why he’s still alone.
It’s pathetic, really. But he’s still my dad and I feel sorry for him, too.
I dish the nuggets and green beans onto a chipped dinner plate and call him to dinner, where he lumbers in—beer in hand—and takes his place at the head of the table, the only chair from which he can still see the TV. “Catch the fucking ball!” he screams, smacking the table hard with the palm of a sweaty hand, sending his fork spiraling into the air before it crashes down to the ground. As he reaches down to grab it, he smacks his head on the corner of the wood table and curses. And then he laughs as his forehead swells and turns bright red.
Just another night in our house.
Tonight we don’t make small talk. Instead, I model good behavior, the way you’re supposed to use a knife to spread butter, the way you’re supposed to eat the beans with a fork and not your hands. I watch as Pops drags half of a dinner roll through the tub of margarine and think: no wonder this guy is still single. He had a lot more to offer my mother when he was young, employed and sober. Needless to say, he’s no longer any of those things. But the reason she left had nothing to do with any of those things, anyway. The reason she left? Motherhood. Me.
I try not to let this go to my head.