Free Calling Home by Michael Cadnum

have to practice every day. Only on the days you eat.” As she did so often, she changed the subject at once. “Let’s go play catch.”
    â€œI don’t have a glove.”
    â€œI wish Mead would come back.”
    She left the room, and came back with two gloves and a scuffed-up softball.
    We stood in the backyard, tossing the ball back and forth. After a few tosses, Lani whipped the ball hard, stinging my hand. She buzzed the ball through the air in that underhand way softball pitchers use, and the ball arrived before I could see it.
    I lobbed the ball back overhand until she complained, and then I threw it back still overhand, but with more power.
    â€œAll right!” she said, and she meant not just my throws, but everything, was all right as far as she was concerned.
    A throw jammed my finger.
    She was at my side at once. “Sorry,” she said.
    â€œIt was my own clumsiness.”
    â€œThat’s the problem.”
    â€œMy clumsiness?”
    â€œThe problem with softball. If I damage a finger, it could hurt my piano playing.”
    On my way home, the One Stop was empty, except for a very elderly man behind the counter, reading a newspaper. I bought a jug of red wine. One Stop is a store where they don’t have twenty of everything, like a supermarket. They have one or two cans of cat food, one box of Brillo pads. The store is mostly empty, vacant shelves and worn wooden floors. But they have TV Guides , potato chips, and wine in quantity.
    The red wine dissolved that place in me that was Mead. The dead, still-living thing.
    And the fear and the guilt that surrounded it, an ugly aura, a puddle of light.

11
    Ted looked up from a glittering locomotive he held in his hands. “Peter,” he said. “This is a piece of work.”
    â€œIt’s beautiful,” I said.
    â€œYes. Four hundred and fifty dollars. It had better be beautiful.”
    â€œWhen will you be ready to use it?”
    â€œI don’t know. Months from now, I suppose.” He turned to the soldering iron at his elbow. “When I retired, I told myself that I would spend most of my time down here with my trains. I told myself that I’d probably be bored stiff after a month or two, but that I’d try it out and see. And you know what? I’m not bored at all.”
    He held the soldering iron, a long, dark pencil, away from the light on the workbench. It glowed when it was held into the darkness, and a satisfied look came over Ted as he put the iron back down on its holder. He put the locomotive into a box lined with crumpled tissue paper and uncoiled a loop of solder. “Of course, my wife thought I was crazy, years ago, when I bought my first set. Maybe she still thinks I’m crazy.”
    He used a pincher to snip off a length of the lead-colored wire. “I’m rewiring the whole thing. Making it all new.” He touched the soldering pencil to the lead and the scent of solder touched me, metallic and pure, then a quiet sizzle.
    â€œLook over against the wall. Go ahead and pick it up.” Ted looked away, then looked back. “Carefully.”
    I stepped in to the shadows and stood beside a range of mountains, with pine trees struggling and failing at the treeline, and snow taking over from there, up to the peaks.
    â€œGo ahead. Pick it up.”
    I stooped and picked up the mountains. They were not heavy, and holding them up to the light from the workbench, I felt like a god; I felt the silliness of the entire enterprise of making toy mountains, and the beauty of it.
    Later, as my mother was getting dressed, she pulled at an earlobe and found a hole in it with the point of an earring. It was the expensive set a worldly and overweight boyfriend had given her a couple of Christmases ago, a urine-colored gem. It was Russian topaz, although my mother called it beryl over the phone to one of her friends. I had done some reading about the neosilicates, in the days when