Free Things You Should Know by A.M. Homes

is no negotiation, no interest in repair, only anger and inertia.
    “It’s not my fault,” he says.
    “If there’s such a thing as fault—it’s half your fault.”
     
    She hurries to prepare for the meeting, the launch of a combination acetaminophen/homeopathic preparation (Tylenol and Rescue Remedy)—Products for Modern Living, a pill for all your problems.
    Wendy, the shared assistant, stops her as she’s going down the hall. “I couldn’t get you a conference room for a whole hour, so I got you two halves.”
    “Two halves of a conference room?”
    “From three to three-thirty you’re in two, and from three-thirty until four you’re in six.”
    “Halfway through, we have to change rooms? That’s crazy.”
    Wendy shrugs.
    “It’s not just about any headache,” she says, sitting down with the client. “It’s your headache. It’s the sense that you’re about to explode. Your head is pounding, the boss is droning on in the background, kids are screaming, you need relief and you need it fast.”
    The client nods.
    “It’s the classic headache ad—pumped up, there’s throbbing and there’s volume and pressure.”
    “Modern life is very stressful,” the client says, happily counting the bucks.
    “There’s the emergency room doctor/trauma surgeon, the voice of authority. ‘As a doctor at a leading trauma hospital, I know about pain, I know about stress, and I know how quickly I need to feel better.’ The doctor moves through the emergency room—all kinds of horrible things are happening in the background. ‘A combination of acetaminophen and a homeopathic supplement, Products for Modern Living offerssafe, effective relief.’ She picks up a patient’s chart and makes a note. ‘Sometimes what’s old is what’s new.’”
    “I like it. It’s fresh and familiar,” the client says.
    “Let’s move from here into conference room six and we’ll review the rest of our campaign,” she says, seamlessly moving her team down the hall.
    Later, she passes Wendy’s desk; Wendy is obsessively dipping cookies into a container of orange juice.
    “Are you okay?”
    Wendy puts out her hands, they’re shaking. “Low blood sugar. I spent from eight-thirty until three trying to get the damned computer to print. I called Information Services, they said they could come tomorrow, but the proposal had to go out today. Never mind. I did it. I got it done.” She plunges a cookie into the juice.
    She hands Wendy a sample of the remedy. “Try it,” she says. “Call it market research and bill them for an extra twenty-five hundred bucks.”
    Again she dials. The phone rings and rings, maybe her mother is there, maybe she is on the other line. Maybe it is her father—her father always ignores the call-waiting, he doesn’t know what call-waiting is.
    “Didn’t you hear me beeping? That was me trying to call you.”
    “Is that what that was? I was on the line, talking to a man about something.”
    She worries that one day she will call and no one will answer—one day she will call and they won’t be there anymore.
    She remembers dialing her grandmother’s number just after her grandmother died. She called just as she had always done. The number rang and rang and somehow she didn’t lose hope that her grandmother would find her way to the phone. She thought it might take longer, but she expected hergrandmother would answer. And then one day there was a recorded voice, “The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected. If you need further assistance please hang up and dial the operator.”
    She hangs up. Six months after her grandmother died, she went to her grandmother’s house and parked outside the front door. The plants that used to be on the sill of the kitchen window were gone. The light in the living room, always on, was off. She walked around back and peered through the sliding glass door. The house was filled with different furniture; different pictures of different grandchildren