A phone call from Ma...

6:57PM

I sit on the brown leather couch tucked under the picture window. I don't know how many years of my life I have looked through this pane of glass. Watching nothing. Watching everything.

The living room opens into the dining room. The arched ceilings still hold an impressively done wallpaper job that is older than I am. My mother sits below the arch, quietly minding her own business around the dining room table that's dressed in Christmas Red.

Beyond the dining room, my sister sits in the kitchen on her laptop finishing the loose ends to another semester.

Distracted by football and unused to hearing my cell phone ring... instead I hear my sister's voice call "Mary, you're phone!".

I'm sure I followed with a confused, "What?" and spent a few minutes trying to quickly unwrap the burrito I have made myself into. I come to end of the throw and hop a few steps into the dining room into the kitchen and, finally, into my purse.

I made it before the last ring.

Caller ID - Parents

"What?", I think. "Hello?" is what I said, with my tone upturned.

I hear a voice of a woman. A woman who seems embarrassed by an accidental wrong number. It's the voice my mother uses when she's unsure of herself.

"Nevermind" I hear from a small voice in the next room, which then echoes into my receiver.

I start the laughter before she does.

I'm not sure it's clicked yet for her.


It surely didn't click when she searched the quick dial for my Aunt Mary.

Not quite when my sister's siren went off.

Still not as she watched me clumsily run to my phone.


My laughter flipped the switched. She laughs with me briefly. Within seconds she is back to hitting the call list, hard.

7:04PM

My phone rings again. It is my mother, "Just calling to check in."



I write this as my mom sits in her chair reading her newspaper. She tells me not to write about her and I tell her I love writing about her because I want to keep these moments.