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

call you.”
    â€œIs 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 rested on the mantel.
    â€œCan I help you?” Mr. Silver, the old man next door asked, as though he’d never seen her before.
    â€œJust looking,” she said and walked away.
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    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.
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    Again, she dials. A man answers. She hangs up and tries again, more carefully, looking at the numbers. Again, the unfamiliar man answers.
    â€œSorry,” she says. “Wrong number.”
    Again, she tries again.
    â€œMay I help you?” he says.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œHello?” 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.
    â€œSorry 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.
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    Again, she dials.
    â€œWho 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,