The Phone Call

 

AI art by Copilot

This is the end of the story.

Mom and Dad came in the door, and Keith and I ran to Mom and hugged her. She was finally home from the hospital, where she’d been for a long time because there was something wrong with her heart. Suddenly we were all three crying—I’d never been so happy that I cried before. Keith and I pointed at each other and laughed and cried at the same time and hugged Mom for a long time.

And this is the rest of the story.

It was an afternoon in 1967. I was at my pastor’s house, and his wife, Mrs. Wilkin, was babysitting me. Every day for a few days—a week or more?—I was to walk up the village’s north hill to her house after morning kindergarten to stay with her . . . because my mom was in the hospital.

Mrs. Wilkin was a nice lady. I remember her as being tall (but all adults were tall), not heavy, and with dark hair. I remember learning to play pick-up sticks while I was with her, and I remember her giving me my first paying job. (I made a dollar!)

Mrs. Wilkin ran a fabric store from her basement, very popular with the ladies of the town. Back in those days women sewed more family garments than we generally do today, and they loved stopping by to chat and browse, purchasing fabric, thread, patterns, and other sewing necessities.

Mrs. Wilkin had a number of tissue-paper patterns that had gotten separated from their packets. My job was to go through all the pattern scraps and match them to their correct packets. It was just the kind of job I loved—organizing things while proving to an adult how smart I was!

I worked on the patterns on the tan carpet of her living room, packets spread out before me, patterns in a separate pile. All I had to do was match the number on the pattern with the number on the packet and insert it. There was quite a stack to go through.

I was doing fine even though everything felt awry without Mom. Dad picked me up and took me down the hill to home when he got off work every day. Then we had supper—it seems as though it was always my favorites, bean soup and fried peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. (Don’t knock ’em till you’ve tried ’em!)

Dad’s eyes were blue, while Mom’s and mine were brown. One evening as I waited at the table for him to prepare supper, watching him and missing Mom, I said, “You’re my blue-eyed mommy with whiskers.” It was one of those statements that became a part of family lore.

I don’t know how many days Mom was gone, but it seemed to be a long time to me. I was certainly a sheltered child, and the idea that Mom might die didn’t cross my mind. She was sick, she was in the hospital, the doctors would make her better, and she would come home. But I didn’t know when, so in the meantime I was for the first time learning to make the best of an unhappy life situation.

As I sat on the floor organizing patterns that afternoon, the kitchen phone rang. Mrs. Wilkin answered and said, “Steve, it’s for you. It’s your mom!”

I stood and crossed the carpeted floor, across which parallelograms of gauzy late-afternoon light rested, having floated in through the room’s sheer curtains, and went into the kitchen. The black dial telephone sat on a white counter, and Mrs. Wilkin handed me the heavy receiver attached to its curly cord.

Mom’s voice: “Steve?” 

“Hi.”

I have no memory of what we talked about. It was awkward to communicate this way, hearing her voice but not seeing her face. I had trouble thinking of things to say, so we didn’t talk long.

After we said good-bye, I hung up the phone and went back to my job. The parallelograms on the carpeting hadn’t moved. Mrs. Wilkin was working on supper in the kitchen, and I was glad she didn’t say anything to me. I had been doing fine before Mom called. But now I had a hard, painful lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. And even though she had said she loved me and missed me, I wished she hadn’t called at all.

Copyright 2024, Steven Nyle Skaggs