Free The Man in the Window by Jon Cohen, Nancy Pearl

about your body? I can get you a free pass to my gym.”
    “Leona, this conversation’s absurd. I have to get down to the Unit.”
    “How about walking? You can burn off—”
    Iris had reached it. “Hey. What do you think will happen if I lose some fat? There’s just more fat underneath. It’s fat all the way. And here’s something else. Has it ever occurred to you that I like being fat and ugly? You ever thought about that? Huh?” Iris’s voice boomed in the stairwell.
    Leona backed away, then turned and ran up the stairs. Iris couldn’t help herself—she watched until Leona’s marvelous ass disappeared from view.
    Iris put a quarter in the pay phone just outside the Unit, the one anxious family members always used to relay bad news about a relative. There’d be four or five of them, looking shocked and blank, handing the phone back and forth, probably scaring the hell out of whomever they were calling, because each of their stories would be different, even though they had all talked to the same nurse or doctor. Fear caused them not to hear straight, and Iris knew that even when they nodded their heads yes, little of what she said ever got through. They saw her lips move, but what they heard was, It’s bad, then it’s going to get real bad, then it will get worse.
    Iris dialed her father’s number. She had moved up from Maryland two years ago to look after him when her mother died. Her father, Arnie, and mother, LuLu, had lived in Waverly only five years. Iris had moved ten times since she was born. Arnie, a retired auto mechanic, would suddenly say at dinner, “I feel itchy, you know?” and Iris and her mother would sigh. They knew that before the month was out, they’d be sitting down to dinner in a different house in a different town. When LuLu died, Arnie went into a deep funk. Iris said, “You going to get itchy again?” Arnie said nope, he didn’t think so, looked like Waverly was akeeper. That scared Iris, so she invited him to stay in her little twin in Towson, Maryland, but he said nope again. Which scared her even more, so she moved up to Waverly to keep him from going out to the garage and inhaling carbon monoxide or taking a big gulp of battery acid—she imagined that if he did himself in, he would honor his profession and somehow involve a car. Not kill himself in a crash, he’d never take a car down with him, but maybe plug himself into the electrical system and hit the ignition, something like that. Arnie never actually brought up the possibility of suicide after LuLu’s death, but Iris, ever the nurse, had to consider it. She’d worked a year in Emergency and had seen people who killed themselves for the smallest and unlikeliest of reasons.
    The phone rang seven times before Arnie picked it up. Iris held the receiver away from her ear in anticipation of his clearing his throat loudly, which is what he always did before he spoke. “Hello,” he finally said.
    “That’s a disgusting habit,” said Iris.
    “Hello?” Arnie said again. He used his deaf left ear, the ear he’d pressed against car engines for forty years to listen for the little clicks and gurgles only a mechanic can decipher.
    “Don’t clear your throat—”
    “Wear my coat?” said Arnie. “Who is this?”
    “Iris!”
    “Iris? What you calling for, girl? You forget your coat?”
    “It’s summer, Arnie. Why would I be wearing a coat?”
    “I don’t know. You’re the one who called.”
    “Forget it.”
    “Okay, then. See you later.”
    “Arnie!” Too late. He’d hung up. The pay phone swallowed her quarter. She waited for the dial tone to return, then she put in another one. Fifty cents to talk to that old fool, she thought, dialing.
    She waited for him to finish with his throat noises. “Hello,” he said.
    “Arnie, this is Iris. Don’t hang up.”
    “Why would I hang up?”
    “Well, you hung up on me last time.”
    “Girl, don’t they give you enough to do at that job of yours, you got all