Free Things You Should Know by A.M. Homes Page A

rested on the mantel.
    “Can I help you?” Mr. Silver, the old man next door asked, as though he’d never seen her before.
    “Just looking,” she said and walked away.
     
    It is getting dark: five-twenty-two. If she hurried she could take the six o’clock Metroliner, she could be in Washington by eight. She wants to go home. It has been coming upon her for days. Almost like coming down with a cold, she has been coming down with the urgent need to go home, to sit at her place at the kitchen table, to look out her bedroom window at the trees she saw at one, at twelve, at twenty. She needs something, she can’t say exactly what. She keeps brushing it off, hoping it will pass, and then it overwhelms her.
     
    Again, she dials. A man answers. She hangs up and tries again, more carefully, looking at the numbers. Again, the unfamiliar man answers.
    “Sorry,” she says. “Wrong number.”
    Again, she tries again.
    “May I help you?” he says.
    “I keep thinking I’m calling home, I know this number, and yet you answer. Sorry. I’ll check the number and try again.”
    She dials.
    “Hello?” the man says. “Hello, hello?”
    She says nothing.
    He waits and then hangs up.
    She puts on her coat and leaves the office. If she had reached her mother she might have felt good enough to go to the gym or to go shopping. But what started as a nervous tic has become something more, she is all the more uncomfortable, she goes directly to the apartment.
    There is a message from Steve.
    “Sorry we didn’t talk. I meant to call earlier but things got crazy. Tonight’s the game. I’ll be home late.”
    The game. She forgot.
    She takes off her coat and pours herself a glass of wine.
    Steve is at the game with his best friend, Bill. Bill is forty-three, never married. Bill won’t keep anything perishable in his apartment and has no plants because it’s too much responsibility. When he’s bored he drones “Next,” demanding a change of subject. Inexplicably, it is Bill whom Steve turns to for advice.
     
    Again, she dials.
    “Who are you trying to reach?” the man asks. This time, no hello.
    Without saying anything, she hangs up.
    She orders Chinese. She calls her brother in California; she gets his machine. “When did you last talk to Mom and Dad? Were they okay? Did something happen to their phone? Call me.”
    By ten, she is beginning to imagine horrible things, accidents. She is dialing and dialing. Where are they? At seventy-six and eighty-three, how far can they have gotten?
    She remembers New Year’s Eves when she was young, when she was home eating Ruffles with Ridges and California Dip, watching New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and waiting.
    Eleven-fifty-nine, the countdown, sixty seconds away from a new year; three, two, one. The ball drops. The crowd goes crazy.
    “Happy New Year from Times Square in New York. Look and listen as America welcomes in 1973.” She drinks her fizzy cider and waits. Ten minutes later the phone rings.
    “Happy New Year, sweetie,” her mother says. “We’re having a wonderful time. Mrs. Griswald is just about to serve dessert and then we’ll be home. It’s going to be a good year.”
    She remembers checking the clock—twelve-twenty. At one, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve segued into the late, late movie and she began to wonder. At one-thirty wonder turned to worry. At quarter of two she was picturing her parents’ car in a ditch by the side of the road. At two-twenty she wondered if it was too late to call the Griswalds and ask when they’d left. She was twelve years old and powerless. By two-forty, when she heard their key in the door, she was livid. She slammed the door to her room and turned off the light.
    “Honey, are you all right?”
    “Leave me alone.”
    “I hope she didn’t get into the liquor—should I check?”
    “I hate you.”
    Happy New Year.
    She gives it one last go—if they don’t answer, she is going to call Mrs. Lasky, one of the neighbors, and ask if things